Thanks, the relative obscurity of this in the GT line-up (only 1992 and 1993 and even then they were quite different) and the use of different tubing in the frame (TT GTX heat-treated top tube and Tange Prestige Concept heat-treated down tube and seat tube apparently - thanks GM) are probably what most attracted me to it.
I should have started with the frame, since that's where it did start. I'll have to have a look through the pictures on my computer and see if I have a photo of how the bike looked when I got it.
It came with some cheap suspension forks, stem and bars, with the original DX Rapidfire Plus on the right and a more modern Shimano rapidfire on the left. The wheelset was some very cheap throwaway efforts. It had it's original M735 front mech, but a M737 rear mech, which was promptly sold on ebay. It does have it's original GT replaceable rear hanger, which was a bonus. The crankset was some horrendous cheap all-in-one steel effort, which looked to be matching but was actually 170mm one side and 165mm the other!
Front brakes were some cheap v-brakes (connected to the DX canti lever) and the rear were the original LX cantis (connected to the modern v-brake lever).
Finally the seat post ..... as soon as I looked closely it was clear something was wrong. After undoing the original seat clamp, the very short seatpost and heavy mattress seat pretty much fell out to leave this:

I tried several methods to remove it before resorting to caustic soda:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=207241As you can see in the picture, the paint work was already very shabby. It was hard to tell if it had been repainted in the original colour, or whether it had just been touched up in places (including the obligatory overspill onto the headset cup. This allowed me to be more carefree with the caustic soda, as I knew I'd be having it repainted anyway.
The end result was very impressive - I cleaned out the seat tube afterwards, but there was barely any residue left.
I had decided from the start that I wanted to fit it with rigid forks, mainly because in general I prefer them and although the '93 Richter 8.0 originally came with Rockshox Quadras the geometry was still right for a standard c.395mm fork. Initially, I intended to use some nice straight blade Dawes Geo-max forks that I bought on here (thanks bren, I'm planning their use in a future project) but by this point I'd decided on an ahead stem and headset, so I searched again. Ebay to the rescue, with some bargain straight-blade 1996 Dawes Geo-max forks, which were an option on the Edge that year. They were a lovely custard yellow, but that was alright, because after a long wait, I finally took them to LSN coatings in Castleford to have the frame and forks powdercoated.
Next update will have the pictures of the frame and the forks when I got them home.