1991 Rocky Mountain Titanium

hi
my RM Titanium serial number is 3790.

i'm liking how yours is coming along.
mine is a slow go. just had threads added
to steer tube. picked it up tonight.
fork is sorted out. needs to be painted now.

are those the new decals on it now?
how about some good pictures of them.
i could use a some too. i can get the generic
rocky ones nos locally. but nedd to source
the titanium and tubinbing decals.
roy
 
Heh, I was about to chime in... the titaniums with the monostay are litespeed made, the Ti-bolt with the fastback stays are Sandvik (they weren't called TST at the time, that came much later). The TeamComp's were welded by Chris Dekerf and only existed actually as a 1992 model year offering. Some of the Rocky Team riders used them (there's at least one magazine advertisement photo with then team captain Andy Tout riding one) but otherwise they were a model that didn't do well for the company retail level. I owned two myself. A mercury colour 21.5" size and a british racing green 20" size. The mercury one actually ended up being the lighter of the two frames.

Pecco's Velo in ottawa which was the largest rocky dealer in canada at the time (seriously... the owner at the time Denis Cousineau is filthy rich, he owns several blocks worth of the byward market area of ottawa... two of his sons now run the bike shops/business... they have their own brand of bikes also) and sold a third of all the production run of the experience model made in 1992 just in this area due to some idiocy by the euro-importer whose name I forget but he'd later "invest" in rocky during their first impending bankruptcy. When the shipping container got overseas, containing something like 200 bikes, he opened the thing, pulled two boxes out, opened them to inspect them (the frames had actually been welded in japan) and then found them missaligned and rejected the whole shipment. RMB was suddenlly stuck with a whole lot of bikes that they'd expected to be sold in europe and nobody to sell them to elsewhere, or so they thought. Along comes Denis finding this out, and offered them $200 cash per bike, for the whole container. Turns out the only two bad frames were the ones that got pulled out, closest to the container doors. The rest were fine, and he sold the bikes in their two stores for $900 each (at a time the model's msrp was near $1400). To this day, nearly 20 years later there are still at least a dozen of them being ridden around the city, mostly as commuter bikes.

Anyway Pecco's was responsible for the revival of the at least one model name (the Sherpa) in 1994 when they requested a bike just for them, be made using the fusion frames and the Alivio/STX parts group (though the prototypes were built around leftover team-comp and altitude frames that were painted green) to hit a lower price point. Until that time, rocky's lowest model was the fusion, and at about a grand in 1994, it wasn't a great "entry" level price to get people onto the brand. When they sold so many, Rocky offered it to other dealers. Fast forward to the present time, and another local dealer, Bicyclette de hull is the largest rocky dealer in canada, doing essentially the same thing pecco's did 20 years ago. Buying RMB's clearouts and demo fleets each year, and selling them on ebay for the most part, or sometimes stripping them apart to piecemeal them out. BdH is in fact, the largest bike dealer on ebay in canada.

Also Chris Dekerf actually worked for rocky before leaving to start his own company. He's listed in I believe the 1989 catalog as the head welder for TIG bikes (like the Tantalus and Altitude. He was still doing contract work after he started his brand which is how he came to weld up the Team Comps and possibly some of the blizzards) whereas Derek Bailey was the actual head welder overall and was the only guy who did the fillet-brazed bikes like the Thunderbolt (he did my 198:cool: and the Turbo (he did my 1987).

The blue-tint post is a faded first generation Syncros. They didn't change the design because of IRD (it was only a USA patent anyway) but because the pressed/bonded in head they went to for the second generation was lighter and somewhat stronger. Third generation got the brass round pivot nuts in the top clamp that allowed better angle adjustment. Fading annodizing was a problem back then as the company that did the syncros stuff also did the raceface stuff, and I lost track of how many "pink" raceface bars I saw that had faded from red after being left out in the sun too long.

One of my second-generation syncros posts was starting to suffer the annodizing fade problem when the top end of the shaft SPLIT and the head broke out while out on a ride, on one of the current Pecco's brand bikes, an Eclipse Hero FS4 carbon, which I've built as a 650B.

Using a powerlite fork on a bike you plan to ride is asking for a trip to the dentist... the crowns used to split due to the ridiculously tiny bolts they used to tighten the clamp on the fork blades. There was a major snapping during the canadian XC nationals during a hill climb section of a fire road in 1991 and the forks were immediately dropped from the lineup afterwards (that they cost as much as you could buy a suspension fork for back then for didn't help matters).
 
thanks for the replies.

anthony - thanks for that,it's not a forum i've looked at before but looks very interesting

classen - i've no patience at all so just got the post decals off ebay,i know they're wrong and need changing.i'm not really going for period correct and always liked xtr 95x on titanium so went for it,if we all liked the same stuff we'd all be riding zaskars :LOL:
as for the pedals,i hate them too :oops: .unfortunately i broke my foot and after trying every pedal there is i've found that this type is the only one i can use.i don't like them but there really is nothing i can do about them

roy - pm me your email address and i'll take as many pictures of the decals as you like and send them over.
any pictures of your's?

roc6839 - thanks


deeeight - man alive that's a lot of info :LOL:
great reading and very informative,many,many thanks

so that's it then,a litespeed built rocky mountain titanium from (probably) 1992 - i think :LOL:
 

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