Mountain biking is not the oldest sport in the world, but there have been plenty of fads that have come and very quickly gone since it first got going.
There certainly aren’t enough fingers on one hand to count how many ‘next big things’ have disappeared and died off not long after their inception, but here are just some of the trends that are particularly memorable for failing to live up to the hype…
Today you’ve generally got the choice of three wheels sizes; 26in, 29in or 27.5in.
Back in the day however, it was simply 26in. Or that’s what they want you to think at least. The reality was far more hilarious.
Bikes like the 1984 Cannondale SM-500 had a 26in wheel at the front and a 24in wheel out the back. The thinking behind the design was really quite simple – let’s copy motocross but use what we have available.
Conventional wisdom suggests the larger front wheel will roll easily over trail obstacles and the smaller rear wheel will be easier to accelerate for fast sprints.
“Shame they didn’t think about the fact that you’d look like you’re riding a clown’s bike…”
Shame they didn’t think about the fact you’d get laughed at for having a clown’s bike – or having to carry two different sized inner tubes for that matter.
What’s really sad is that bike designers failed to learn from Cannondale’s mistake. In 2007 Trek used the same idea of a big wheel at the front and a smaller wheel at the rear for its 29in/26in 69er. They didn’t, unfortunately, give you oversized red shoes and a flower that squirts water when you bought the bike.
The ’90s could be described as a time that style forgot mountain biking, and when style wasn’t being ignored, sound engineering certainly was.
There can be no other explanation for snowflake laced wheels. These were built with a regular three cross design, but used spokes around 3mm longer than they should’ve been.
“The ’90s could be described as a time that style forgot mountain biking…”
The extra length allowed them to be twisted around each other at the final crossing point. The benefit? To some people it looks good (although to others you look like a character from the Christmas film ‘Elf’). The downside? A pain to true and if a spoke breaks you’ll spend all day trying to replace it.
Some bright sparks took the aesthetics of this concept even further and used aluminium spoke nipples. Basically, they took a wheel difficult to true and then added nipples that will round off when you start to try and put serious tension into the spokes.
Engineering. Who needs it?
If you were a real poseur and a snowflaked wheel was too common for you, then the next hot ticket was a Tioga Disc Drive.
If it was good enough for multiple World Champion John Tomac it was good enough for us to rag about on in the woods.
The Disc Drive itself was a set of Kevlar strings laminated into a plastic disc that replaced the spokes in a rear wheel. It looked awesome and sounded even better. Shame they had a tendency to collapse without warning. Not good when they cost about £500 – not including the hub or the rim.
A supposed benefit of the Disc Drive was a small amount of suspension. But what was the best way to get some bounce at the front of your bike when suspension forks didn’t exist? Fit a Girvin Flexstem of course.
There’s a clue in the name about how this gem worked. It was a handlebar stem that pivoted just in front of the steerer tube with a small elastomer underneath to provide the suspension damping.
As for suspension, your bars simply wobbled up and down as you rode for a bit and you had a relatively heavy stem at a time when we were all obsessed with weight.
In 1990 my first serious MTB weighed in at over 30lbs, and it didn’t even have any suspension.
It soon went on a diet, with stock parts swapped out for supposed lighter upgrades at great expense, but some riders were far more obsessive than even I was.
I have distinct memories of chatting to a professional racer who had gone and drilled random holes in his cranks and then spent a whole day filing down a first generation set of Shimano SPD pedals just to save a few grams. He could have saved as much weight by just going to the toilet on race day morning.
Today everyone rides with wide bars. The wider the better. Back in the day though, the opposite was true.
You know how I mentioned how we were a little bit weight obsessive? Well we would do all we could to get our bike’s weight down, and to us it made perfect sense to cut an inch or two off the ends of our bars to drop some grams, throwing away up to £10 worth of offcuts in the process.
The fact that you could barely steer the bike afterwards wasn’t thought about when we pulled the hacksaw out of the tool box.
Today you get disc brakes on even the cheapest of mountain bikes, but back in the day they simply didn’t exist; mechanical or hydraulic.
If you wanted good brakes you had V-brakes as an upgrade from the existing cantilever brakes, or what has now happily been all but forgotten – the U-brake.
The horseshoe shape of a U-brake meant it collected mud really damn badly. Then, to aggravate the problem even further, bike designers put the brake under the chainstays where it could get even more clogged up. Genius.
In the mid-to-late-90s we went a bit crazy on the colour front. One of the easiest ways to get some of this essential colour on your bike was to swap steel bolts out for anodized aluminium ones.
You could do it pretty cheaply and there was even a bit of a weight saving bonus as well. It ticked all the 90s boxes.
“Some riders must have been severely colourblind. There was no excuse for the terrible selections on show…”
Some riders must have been severely colourblind though. There was no other excuse for the terrible selection of colours on show.
A far greater problem than this though was the use of alloy bolts in the wrong locations. Due to the tensile strength of the average anodized alloy bolt, it should only be used in low stress applications like brake lever clamps.
That didn’t stop idiots from using them on their brakes. Just stop and think for a minute about how much stress can potentially go through a bike’s brake when it’s being applied. Now think of a bunch of tools crashing hilariously coloured bikes. It wasn’t all bad I guess…
When MTBs first appeared they took a lot of technology from road cycling, and while a lot of it worked well, some of it just wasn’t up to the job.
Headsets are the case in point. Today there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of standards, but back then all bicycles had 1in diameter headtubes and headsets that threaded on to the fork’s steerer tube.
On the road this wasn’t a problem, but the hammering the average rigid mountain bike took meant that the two big nuts on the top of a headset would soon loosen off and need tightening. A simple job but one that required two 32mm spanners. Not the sort of thing you normally throw in your pack when you go riding.
That’s why today almost all bikes have threadless headsets that can be adjusted with an Allen key.
I’ve heard it said that there are no new ideas anymore, and there are lots of examples of people trying to reinvent the wheel in mountain biking. Some, unsurprisingly, are more successful than others.
One current trends is dropper seat posts, but they’re nothing new. It’s just that these days they’re far more sophisticated than the option we had back in the day.
“There was no guarantee your seat would be back in the right place or even straight when you let it raise…”
We simply had a quick release on the seatpost clamp and would stop and move the post up and down as needed. Then some bright spark in the USA came up with the Hite-Rite.
It was basically just a scissor spring, one end of which fitted the seat post quick release and the other bolted to a clamp around the seat post itself. When you wanted to drop the post you opened the quick release, and in theory at least, the saddle would drop out of the way when you put your weight on it.
Shut the clamp, ride that tricky section, undo the clamp and up slides the seat. Unfortunately it only worked if your post was well greased and there was no guarantee that your seat would be back in the right place or even straight when you let it raise.
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