These bikes are a great snapshot of the era, very few people knew what they were doing!
Having owned and ridden many of this era of bikes, very few builders got the recipe right
If you go back to the history of these things, many were copies and there is nothing easier than to copy someone else's work. That's why many bikes looked the way they did and with the availability of only a limited catalogue of tubesets, dropouts and lugs, customisation would have bumped the price up.
The Ranger simply isn't a good bike, it is an okay bike but not when compared to other models,( all be it very few!) that were available.
They had all seen what specialized were up to and wanted in on the act
Dawes and Ridgeback were the only volume producers capable of knocking out the ultra fashionable and lucrative mtb/ atb at the time. But this was a very very short time, new names would soon become available leaving these bikes looking very old hat within a few months
