Kona Humuhumu-nukunuku-apu'a build FINISHED!

I got a 2007 Kona cruiser from Evans cyles in Jan 2008 half price. I've now nearly changed every part on it, some parts I've changed back. Over the next few weeks I'll add pictures cos it's nearly finished.

When i bought the bike I thought even though it has a ridiculously long stays at the back and messed up slack angles it'd be a laugh for jumping off stuff in town and manualing down hills. I binned the silly bars it came with originally straight away cos they slipped no matter how tight i did the stem and put a set of Gusset Prison Bars on with a shim in the stem clamp. I used the little pot of black paint that came in the box to paint over the yellow letters. I saw a Snafu BMX seatpost for £4 at work and got that and another shim to make the fit, found a saddle in the shed,some Avid Speed Dials and had one of them pulling the stock Tektro V-brake, swapped the front wheel for a red Hope suspension/Mavic 121 which i had built for me in about 96 and still runs as good as new. I had a Sun Mammoth rim kicking around too so i built that onto the 130mm single speed hub the bike came and replaced the 42 tooth chainring with a 32 and then set about attacking Lincoln on it.
One night, however, it's lanky geometry caught me out and after landing 180s smoothly over and over out of the top of this big grassy bowl in the Usher gallery gardens I landed with the front wheel over the lip and felt something weird happen. not a snap, but just a sloppy horrible feeling and i couldnt tell what it was. It as sson as i got back on the tarmac i could feel the steering was really weird and then i noticed the front wheel wasn't where nature inteded. THe Project 2s were dead.

like a phoenix from ashes and bird poo

The bike went into the shed for a year or so because i was studying and not really in a position to be looking for new forks so the bike went into hiding with all the parts off my old GT Tequesta. Mostly a Lidl bag full of STX-Rc parts, seized chains, homemade bashguards, mystery tyres, cassettes of uncertain origin, axles.. pedals with no spindles you know what i mean.. and it all stayed together getting covered in birdshti for the next two years.
At Christmas the year before last i needed a bike as i was back in the Lincolnshire countryside so i got the kona out and assessed its situation. i knew i had some cro-mo gt forks in the garage and even thought they were bent, they were bent the opposite way so i tried those for a change. the bike was still horrible to ride, the rear wheel wasn't straight, everything was covered in white blobs of poo, it had no brakes, it looked pretty sad so i cleaned it up.
I remembered another box of retro parts in the house and i got a club roost i beam stem on there and a set of x lite g force downhill bars, i saw a pair or Marzocchi XCRs hanging up I'd always known i had but assumed they wouldn't be of any use. Turns out i'd hung them up in about 1997 and preferred the rigid forks on the GT so they stayed hanging up in perfect working order... not quite perfect one of the seals seems to leak a little, they work and apart from the flex and the pathetic travel they gave a pretty cool look to the bike. the Material came off the saddle, they tyres were pumped up, and off i went on the country roads in the dark on compacted snow. I had a right laugh and spent a lot of time sliding down the deserted roads on my back giggling. I decided i'd take the bike away with me and make it into something proper.
When it arrived home with me it looked something like this:

As soon as i got it home i started getting some parts together, my original plan was to build it with the parts i wanted for my Tequesta when i was about 15 but I'm more likely to use it for commuting and fopr general transport purposes so lightweight part are more important than strong parts. I used to break bike parts and body parts but now i have a job, incidentaly one which sastisfies my need to injure myself without having to go off road...
So the bikes never going off road. The geometry's not really right, i dont really have the time, but it means that i can build a super light commuter with a mid 90s mtb + klunker old school hybrid lovechild fixed gear feel. perfect for 45 second commute to work each morning.
I got a fixed rear cog, back to a 42 tooth freewheel, didn't bother with the brakes, kept the 90s bar stem set up even though the long stem and squidgy forks felt weird at first, eventually it became a wonderful experience, anyone who hasnt ridden a fixed gear bike really should; providing you live somewhere relatively flat and you're not weak or obese you'll find it a profound experience. never relying on brakes means you're forced to maintain absolute control all the time, you become much more efficient in corners and are rewarded with uninterrupted momentum. Nipping through traffic on a bike with no controls on the bars and the minimum of fuss involved is enlightening, like being gently pulled through the city on a piece of string like being in fast forward when compared to the static traffic. I deicided I'd try to shed some more weight.
I swapped the Marzocchis for some rigid forks i had on a road bike. I don't ride it any more, I don't often have long distances to cover now and although it was commuting on a road bike that first gave me the buzz of defeating city traffic i always wanted something i could hop up steps on to open up the city even more. Road bike geometry and wheels didn't really allow this.
In it's third conifguration the cruiser had the stock stem, the road bike forks, the original rim built onto the rear hub until a matching 121 turned up and until a red Hope freewheel with a 130 axle - ideally - turned up (that could be a long wait) red and silver Middleburn rS2s.. and awaited a nice seatpost and tyres skinny enough to go through those forks.

I found a NOS purple USE seatpost and despite it clashing with red hub/crank spider/rim i put that on lost the super heavy steel bmx seatpost. It needed another shim but i got in touch with USE and they were very helpful. then i set about looking for either a red Hope freewheel or a matching pair of suitable hubs. I found a pair of silver Hope hubs, a freewheel with a 130 axle and Lightweight front and I found a Mavic 121 on ebay for under three quid and built a rear wheel this time with a freewheel not a fixed cog cos im fed up of trashing my pedals on curbs and the step at the front of my house. By this time i'd worked out the final configuration for the bike. Around this time i started looking on retrobike regularly for suitable forks and advice on how to sort out the chainline. It tuned out to be as simple as I'd first thought, just a case of flipping the rear axle round and running the long spacer on the non-drive side and then dishing the wheel right over to get it half way between the brake blocks. I figued by this time it'd be better to run a front brake as well so the new forks would have to have canti mounts even though i quite liked the clean look of the road forks theyre not practical and that shou;d take precedence over aesthetics imo.

The hubs i got were a bit of a disappointment. The front one despite saying excellent condition were, as I'd hoped to avoid, victims of the cracked flanges my local bike shop guy had warned me of. I won't say who sold me it until I'm sure he isn't returning my money. I feel I'm in the process of being fcuked over as we speak but I'll give him another week to give me the money back before I add my name to the apparently long list of people he's annoyed. Anyway...
The obvious problem of running a quick release rear hub in a sliding dropout is tht it'll probably slide forward when it's not meant to and I didnt feel i could trust it so i got some chain tensioners from ebay. I think they were made by savage components and they seem to be doing the job, theyre also purple so that's nice and they were cheap. they hold the hub in place by tugging on the qr skewers which isnt ideal, i actually replaced them with some allen key skewers and it all seems fine and it meant getting the blue one off the front and having silver throughout. It feels solid and that's what's important i guess. I'm still running the red front one but if anyone wants to swap a red Hope suspension for a similar logo silver Hope front hub get in touch. My aim is to get all the red off by the time i come to refinish the frame.

I've got a pair of amp research F2 forks coming and a ringle zooka quill stem in black with yellow graphics. that'd match the frame perfectly but there's a pretty good chance that when i've hung all the shiny parts on and got everything hunkydory ill probably refinish it anyway. So this week some more pieces should be arriving at the workshop and if i get my camera back ill add their mugs to this thread.
i'm itching to get on with it actually. I'm fighting the urge to cover it in nitromors and order new stickers to stick onto its bare steel frame. I never liked the black and yellow anyway.... i'd only be keeping it cos the stem's gonna match. anyway watch this space more pictures coming soon

I got restless and bought nitromors. I stripped the frame and made some enquiries about new stickers. i think i'm going to get the stickers from a 95 humu cruiser, theyre kinda orange retro looking kona letters, i think the orange will look good with the grey of the frame. I polished the absolute bejeezus outta the cranks and they ended up looking much nicer than when i got them, they had scuff marks on and now they look like new. old. better than new... you know..

Then this badass turned up, complete with the stem i wanted originally, and the forks too, with really cool mudguards thrown it for good measure

I thought the stem would look good with my x lite bars ...
And even though i havent got a one inch threaded headset i put it all together to see what it looked like.
now would be a good time to go back to the original wheels and back to fixed gear, don't want any nasty cables getting all these nice lines messed up.
Just a shame those fat tyres don't go through the mudguards...