Silverfish 1992 Mountain Cycle San Andreas

Silverfish

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This one has been gathering dust in the warehouse for far too long 😳

The San Andreas is probably my favourite bike of all time. I’ve owned various different versions of Mountain Cycle and San Andreas bikes over the years but never an early San Andreas. Saw loads of these in California BITD and loved the raucous sound they make hammering down the trails. This bike was truly way ahead of its time - disc specific chassis, front and rear disc brakes, inverted fork, monocoque construction, bolt on seat mast, box section swingarm and bonkers travel for an XC machine.

This specific bike is a previous BOTM winner February 2012. Baulz kindly offloaded it to me in 2014 or 2015. It was already pretty much perfect but the bikes I remember were specced slightly differently. I bought it with loads of great intentions to tweak the spec but by 2014 I was bonkers busy with work and the retro bikes kinda took a back seat. For about 10 years 🤣

Here is Baulz’s original build thread
https://www.retrobike.co.uk/threads/1992-mountain-cycle-san-andreas-updated-pics-page-3.184065/

This won’t be a long build. I’ve sourced most of the bits I need - and there really is very little that needs changing - but I’ve hit a wall with my Funk, Sonoma and ARC builds so I figured I’d get this one finished.

Photos attached
The BOTM winning shot
4 pics of when I received the bike in January 2015
1 random pic from 2019 of it hanging up in the Silverfish warehouse
And one from last year when I brought it home to start ‘working’ on it.
 

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Last edited:
Slow progress tonight.
Replaced the saddle for the ubiquitous Flite 👍
Cleaned and polished the frame.
Rear suspension’s working fine. Front is rock solid.
I think I’m going to need new elastomers 🤦‍♂️
Need to find a manual first tho as I was sure System II forks had elastomers both sides.
These only appear to have elastomers on one side?
Plus the headset is fucked so I’m going to need to find a replacement threaded super short stack height headset ASAP.

So not the quick and easy job I was hoping for 😢
 

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