'96 Marin Monocoque (purists beware! ;-) )

After seeing a Monocoque near my house last year I remembered that when I was young and broke I really liked this strange bike.
So after some waiting and searching I found a frame for a small price. Unfortunately the frame had been handpainted in black housepaint.....

I want this bike to be my everyday XC bike (next to a singlespeed Marin Bear Valley and a custom Cyclo LTHT 29er) so I'll build it with a variety of parts:

Frame: Marin Monocoque
Fork: Marzocchi Z2 X Fly
Wheels: Mavic Crossmax
Gears: 1x10 Shimano XT on E13 crankset
Brakes: Magura HS33 10th Aniversary
Stem: Thomson
Rest of the parts are yet undecided so far.

Just to check how it looked with wheels:


So first action was to clean the paint off, which is a bitch as the usual paintstrippers didn't really work on this kind of paint....
While stripping I found one of the cable bosses was cracked and unusable. I anyway didn't like the look of the bosses. (pretty nastly welds too)
Going with Magura's and 1x10 and all internal cables I decided to strip off all bosses and the canti hanger.





So currently I am sanding the frame to try to get it smooth. Which is a bit of a challenge as there are some dents and also the welds of the monocoque are not very nicely done in all places. I want to keep the frame bare aluminium with red accents, so I think I'll have to live with these minor faults.

However, after receiving the fork yesterday I got a feeling that this might become a really nice bike.




Just finished tracing the decals from an online photo, so now I need to find someone who can print these.

Hope I didn't offend too many people here with my modifications, but in my opinion the frame will only look better without the slighty awkward bosses. (Also in the original folder the frame doesn't have the the bosses on top, which looks much better)

It starts to look like a bike! Main point now is to get the brakes fitted and filled, and get the decals. But having it ridden around the neighborhood I feel it will make a very nice XC machine. (And it is not nearly as noisy as I expected)

Nice pic and interesting build...

Re:

I'm liking this!
I've recently taken the canti bosses off my Rocky Ridge build so know where your coming from

Thanks! And phew, was starting to wonder if I went too far for this website. ;-)

Re:

That looks ubercool to me.

Were it mine, I wouldn't bother with the decals, as I like the semi-industrial / bare metal look.

I love the frame shape of this . There is so much potential

NeilM":1qatr84w said:

That looks ubercool to me.

Were it mine, I wouldn't bother with the decals, as I like the semi-industrial / bare metal look.

Click to expand...

Industrial good descriptive.

Sorry guys, but I just ordered some red decals from Gil... I believe this will nicely contrast with the raw finish and actually bring out the raw more. Saw that the new Magura hose has been delivered to the neighbours so hopefully today I can also brake.

And while I am at it, a couple more pics:

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That's so cool

Re:

Awesome frame, love it. Never seen one in person, but I like it, its like it came straight from an engineers draft without much concession to convention, but has a lot of purity in it's design.