2008 Marin Pine Mountain ... the wabi sabi

grantoury

Kona Fan
In february of this year I bought a large 29er frame painted matte black, not knowing what it was. It looked on the large side but it was a rigid steel 29er which is what I was after

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With advice from @Guinessisgoodforyou (Thanks bro') I started to take off the black paint with a knife and soon realized it was a Marin.

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A bit of research and the help of @benjabbi and it appeared I had a 2008 singlespeed Marin Pine Mountain. In the following months I took most of the black paint off wet sanding. The details were harder to do with sand paper so I used paint thinner and the course side of a sponge. At some point I started to take off the original paint and going through to bare metal. I stopped and cleaned and shined the result with Autosol. At this point it was clear to me that this bike had been stolen at some point and the still rather good paint was covered with a rattlecan paint job.

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My initial plan was to have it repainted and put nice crisp decals on it, but for some reason the end result of the cleaning seemed interesting. I decided to first build and ride it.

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The parts were collected in the next few months, a used Chris King, old stock Avid BB7S for road use (🤣), Tektro short pull levers, NOS Sachs Quarz cranks, Kalloy riser bar, Deda short stem as this is an xl frame, a Selle Italia leather saddle, Alivio derailleur and shifter, wheels I built from Deore hubs and used Ryde Sputnik rims, Ergon grips and finally a dirt cheap Aliexpres narrow wide chainring. I took my time building it and finished it today. In Japanese esthetics Wabi Sabi means the acceptance of fleetingness and imperfection, which is a good way to describe the looks of this one.

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