Right then, so I knew right away the initial changes I would make.
A different stem, bars, and a period saddle, along with fresh tires, tubes, cables and grease!
The levers I was on the fence about. I liked the extra a Ritchey hit to match with the seatpost but they've definitely seen better days.
Tires were any easy choice:
I've recently been riding these Rene Herse Humptulip Ridge's on my other bikes, and I have to say they've quickly become an expensive new favourite.
I luckily had an old WTB SST.X saddle on hand that I'd purchased while working on the Phoenix, and it was a no brainer replacement for the newer WTB saddle the bike came with:
For bars:
Having been looking for an original WTB ti bar for the Phoenix for a while now, in classic RB tradition, two showed up suddenly around the same time!
The one at the rear came from
@stevede (thanks to a supreme RB community group effort!) and had been cut down at some point. Those went straight to Dan Chambers (
@danson67) to have some shim extensions fabricated. More on that in the Phoenix thread at some point, but Dan did some exceptional work on these! Anyway, knowing how hard they can be to track down, I also took the plunge on another set that
@jimbog had on his Klein Pulse and was good enough to send my way. These are the ones in the front. They're in great shape, uncut with a nice sweep and the original shim (I think).
The fact the Sovereign came with some crossove WTB history, having been worked on previously by one of their builders and employees, and that it lived its life before me in the same town where WTB was founded, I'd always wanted to include a few classic WTB touches on my eventual build, and hopefully the saddle and bars will be first of a few such touches.
The stem was a little trickier.
I had only 1" options on hand, and
@raidan73 had pointed out before its arrival that the Sovereign would almost certainly come with a 1 1/8" steerer.
Mulling this over, I happened to check eBay one morning in the line for bagels while we were in Texas, and a nice, perfectly sized purple Salsa-made Ibis number popped right up for $80.
Some of you may remember I'd been asking about these stems. Well, confirmed by Ross himself, they were made for Ibis by Ross and his team, to the exact specifications Scott Nichols had requested. I'm not sure how many of these are out there, or what models they came on originally, but the noodle is a nice piece of effective design, and the rest of the stem is exactly as you'd expect from a Salsa Moto product.
I.E. Lovely.
Now the color might be an odd choice on an all black and silver bike, but I had other ideas for a longterm solution and my main focus was getting the bike ridable for me so I could asses what other changes, if any, I'd like to make.
It also happens to be almost the perfect size: 125mm long, with a 10-degree rise.
As you can see above, the one problem is that it doesn't have the actual noodle!
No problem! Part of the pile of parts I'd been collecting in the UK included a fairly well-worn white Salsa stem, that
@iveto1983 had kindly sent my way after I'd posted in the other forum inquiring about them. And his had the noodle! At 150mm the white one was far too long for this bike, but I figured switching the noodle over would be pretty straight forward.
Well, turns out that little bastard was stuck fast with rust. So into an overnight bath of penetrating oil it went!
I'll run through that little process and the finished results in the next post...