No changes since my last post but I did bring my Ritchey down to my trailer in Birch Bay this weekend and figured it was a good chance to grab a few nice pic's in my favorite photoshoot backdrop
Lately most of my vintage MTB tinkering has been fine tuning my existing collection. By nature Iām a person who canāt keep still for long, worse character traits to have I guess, I really enjoy wrenching bikes and planning out builds. But with deciding to not take in any more bikes my energy needs to be diverted somewhere right?
Well, my first love, my Ritchey has become my latest victim
When I completed the 2021 restoration after brokering a deal with my brother to get the bike back I took an approach of convenience and also leaned toward a classic build for a bike from 1987. Convenience in that I had a 6 speed XT donor bike to work from, I couldnāt have been happier with how that build turned out butā¦..
The other day a āriderā condition set of Ritchey Logic cranks came up on FB for a really good deal in my preferred 110 BCD variety. Iāve polished up many sets of cranks and figured Iād at least hang them on my Ritchey for a while, a bit new my build (?) ā¦.
I ordered a set of Logic crank decals but after receiving them rather than fitting them to the cranks I scanned them to make a quality vector file to see if I could cut vinyl good enough to use instead. The decals ordered are printed on clear vinyl, these would work well for sure but having individual cut letters always look best IMHO, Iām happy with how they turned out
Another story: before obtaining my Ritchey frameset in around 88ā I had a set of wheels built up at a quality bike shop in Calgary called Ridley's Cycle. I was talked into a wheelset far beyond what I needed lol: Suntour XC 9000 hubs, 36 (!) 14g spokes laced to Trek Matrix Singletrack dark hard ano rims. These handbuilt wheels where probably in the $200 dollar range (I forget) and were for my current ride at the time, a BRC Sierra whoās wheels I had just potato chipped. This set of wheels eventually transferred to the Ritchey & easily lasted me 10+ years and over 10,000km. The rims breaking surface eventually split, the hubs were separated and have been sitting on a shelf eventually robbed of their cartridge bearings for years, but I still have themā¦
Reason for the above story? Iām bringing my XC 9000 hubs back into action and sourced four new bearings and some NOS dark ano Sun Chinook double walled rims, gonna be nice to have them back with the build, I chose a 6 speed Shimano freewheel to keep indexing working and swapped over to a short cage XT RD, which is what ran on the Ritchey BITD preferred over the long cage.
Couple other small tweaks: Full set of Suntour skewers, Ritchey Logic front calipers, some nice old Ritchey True rubber grips, Vittoria folding tan walls to replace the wire bead Mega Bites (at least for now to save some weight) and swapped the Suntour XCII pedals to XC 9000 units. BITD, I purchased new XC 9000 pedals for the Ritchey which have always been a favorite and many years later (mid 90s) traded them for a very beat up set of 1st gen SPDs because who could afford them back then? Nice to have a set of XC 9000 pedals back on the Ritchey.
In a way, my Ritchey is slowly moving back toward what it once was for me, not so much a stock build but a very personalized build which by the way has shaved over a pound of weight in the process, the Ascent never rode so well!
