@BenPea: I remember so many lizards around my way, most owners saved them off for an even crapper Activator with that awful attempt at front suspension.
@BenPea: my mate Fat Ste had one in 1990 but I had to settle for an Apollo Blizzard 15 because they were on sale at Halfords. Also the same year I started reading MBUK. Over the next couple of years I changed literally every part on that bike until I had a complete new one. Looking at these photos is bringing back a bunch of memories. The Alpinestars Al mega, Halson Inversion forks, Tioga Psycho tyres, the classic Konas and Tioga Disk Drives. Awesome walk down memory lane (and made better because I was too young to afford any of the bikes here at the time - even the RTS2 which was about £900 at the time I think.) @pinkbike how about a "which would you rather have" poll?
@pimpin-gimp: "raleigh activator" is not a google image search for the faint-hearted. Remember lusting after Proflex bikes around then. Never saw suspension in real life.
@jaame: They were in the North West. Not a Maverick, no. I have something at home that kooks a lot like an 80s one though. Possibly a Massif? We may never know.
@BenPea: That could have been it. The well heeled around me rode Marin Palisades, Diamond Back Topangas & Sorrentos. A couple of boys had Saracen Kili Flyers. One of them wore Oakley Razor Blades in red iridium!
@BenPea: I had an Apollo Kalamunda in about 1991/2 in a nice blue colour. 10 speed I think. That last me until 96 when I got a Giant Boulder, and that was the start of my obsession with spending money I don’t have on bikes I can’t ride very well.
@jaame: 1992 me was very happy with it! I stripped it and sprayed it in Ford Tasmin Blue with some Marin and MBUK stickers in about 1994/5 before getting a Giant Boulder for Xmas 1996.
@jaame: used to love that stuff! I grabbed a handful of brochures of all manufactures anytime we went near a bike shop back then, it’s all we could do before the internet came along and made it easier to look at stuff like that.
The only thing that held me off from buying a Klein was the super rigid fork on them... oh and the fact that I was in school and that I had basically no money.
I worked at a big Klein dealer back in the day, and those bikes were beautiful. Big tubes, smooth welds and paint jobs that are still best in the business. They were also OG dentist rides... We sold a lot of them to guys that did 10 miles a year of paved trails on their XTR rigs.
I remember realizing peak Klein occurred when one of their bikes became the bike that hung on the wall in Jerry's apartment in Seinfeld. My uncle also loved to show off his bright orange Klein that he had absolutely no business owning as @Glenngineer points out (it was full XTR and top of the line...he road it up and down a gravel path a few times a year, lol).
They really needed to post pictures from directly in front and directly behind to get the full effect. From those angles it is solid colors. Pretty amazing to see and was always in love with them.
@Glenngineer: I did too and remember those people! They made us good money and understand from a business point of view how important that is now .... but back in the day it upset me.
I had the MRD with the integrated stem. Such a great fork. Now I ride a newer 2010ish Pro. I'm so glad they have brand new models out but I'm not sure they're worth the upgrade for me. I still want one though.
That Alpinestars is amazing. I think that time was when we first started all that nonsense about short chainstays tucking the rear wheel under the rider for better climbing. Lol. What a load of nonsense. But that's what justified the whole elevated chainstay thing.
You can see the seeds of all the ideas that mostly got worked out by today, 25 years later.
lovely looking bikes......god i wish i had a klein. and despite popular opinions not all classic bikes rode bad. my 1994 zasker LE and (much cheaper) kona fire mountain were great xc/trail bikes. sure there nowhere near as good on technical descents as modern bikes but they were soo fast on everything else. too many people nowadays need a super long slack frame to ride anything now.
We need to bring back polished chrome frames and anodized parts for everything! Bikes these days are so bland with their all black bars and stems and most other parts and basic paint designs
I still have my 1998 K2 ProFlex 4000. I converted it to a 1X and it’s got new cranks and bar. Otherwise, it’s period correct. My buddy still has my first ProFlex. The 1995 755. All original except for replacement elastomers
I had a Proflex 854 that I bought new in 1994, loved it and rode the hell out of it for years. Sadly stolen a couple years ago. Eventually found it (thief got prosecuted as well) but by then insurance had covered a replacement. Unfortunately elastomers are hard to find, I did find some of the appropriate material finally, and was about to order some when the bike was stolen.
@EdSawyer: There is a company that makes replacement elastomers for anything you can imagine including proflex bikes. Google suspensionforkparts all one word.
@mrfrench2013: yeah, I had looked at those a while back, had some at one point. THey are way more dense and not the same material as the originals. (microcellular urethane). I did find a company that made MCU in the right size and durometer, never got around to getting any, but they would sell in 12" lengths of tubing.
I had that bike! Well, not really but I had the Selle Italia Turbo saddle with elastomer bumpers that's on it so close enough.
I always lusted after the shiny alu finish one myself!
Does anyone have any ride time on the the Slingshot? Saw one behind the last two Kleins pictured in the article. If so, I would love to hear how it handled. What a bizarre bike..did the front half of the bike independently pivot from the back end? Googled them and there is still a website slingshotbikes.com/bikes.php but they seem to be shuttered now.
One came through a shop I worked in. Never rode it on a trail, but in the parking lot it felt like any other bike from that Era. Reminded me of a swing bike a bit visually. Did take a bit more edge off stuff than Steel alone, but felt noodley and like something was broken...
The Slingshot in the background is mine. It was such a fun bike to take to the Malverns as it generated so much interest and “WTF” comments! The front half does move independently thanks to a leaf spring in the top tube but the movement is minimal. In terms of how it rides, it’s pretty subtle but disconcerting as movement is lateral as well as vertical. I’ve not really ridden it in anger (it terrifies me!) but I’ve been told they climb really well under the right conditions.
@Douggiep: That's rad. Never sell it! I wish we had bike shows around here. Like the NSRA shows there should be NBRA. National bike rod association. There are a lot of cool rare bikes around.
I had a lot of dream bikes as a kid and that was one of the main ones. But I've read modern reviews of them that they're absolutely terrifying to ride aggressively. Funny because all of the magazine reviews of them at the time couldn't say enough good things. I guess perspective changes, but it's always been a lesson in the power of advertising dollars too.
I built up a 29er when I got a cheap frame on ebay - about 15k km on it, rode it until the frame got bent in tranit one time - sold it to someone in China for more than I paid for it! I rode it on mainly very tame stuff on paths (training bike). Was very scared of hitting the front wheel with my toes on anything downhill!
@Douggiep: People don't understand how great those rode. I switched from a Fisher Supercaliber to a Slingshot in 1993, took 2 minutes off my best time on my local 4 mile XC loop instantly. I wish I never got rid of mine...
@Typo-Knig: Agree on the 'feel'. Very hard to describe, and in a sense counter-intuitive (a bit of flex should be less efficient) but glad you have some numbers to back it up. I was never that good.
How about that paint on the Mavericks frames that had flowers painted,for it still is the best looking paint job on any frame ,can’t seem to find them anywhere?,and yeah that Klein paint is beautiful,seen them in the flesh and they are astonishing,and same goes with some retro color tires )))
Great memories from being a kid wanting a pace RC200.
My favourite bikes as a kid was,
Proflex
Mountain cycles San Andreas
And of course Pace RC 200 in anodised Purple.
Probably the reason Purple is still my favourite Colour.
We have an alpinestars AL mega in the shop right now in for a hub rebuild and the customer didn't supply the rear qr skewer so we used a standard qr (for 135mm spacing) and it was way too short due to the comically thick dropouts. The thing has 10mm and 8mm thick dropouts!! They were doing some seriously wild stuff back then!
I remember seeing those hydraulic rim brakes when I was apprenticing as a kid. I thought they were badass until the shop manager informed me that you could crush the rim by braking too hard
The polished Pace, the RC200 F3 (1994): is the front wheel laced like that just for looks or was it thought (back then) to offer some performance benefits? I've never seen it before.
There was talk at the time about it making the wheel more rigid as it would stop the spokes moving against each other (remember rims back then were basically made of tin foil). In reality it made no difference other than creaking a lot, and meant when you snapped 1 spoke, the other one wrapped around it lost all tension as well, making the buckle way worse. They really did look cool though, do that's the main thing.
They can only show them If they own them - I guess nobody has one worth showing off. I know of a few in collections but they are work in progress so aren’t ready for the shows.
I think that bike, to me, will always be THE downhill bike of downhill bikes. In the red/ yellow colourway. I think it was probably in its prime around the time I was getting in to the sport and had my head stuck in issues of dirt mag. It was everywhere.
@giantwhip: Oh shit, yeah! I'd forgotten about that one. I loved those bikes too. They're both right up there in my mountain bike psyche but I think the M1 just edges it.
I’m more excited by the glimpse I got of some Halson Inversion PDS forks! Always thought they were amaze-balls when I saw the adds for them on old Mountain Bike Action Mags…
I would enter my daily driver GT but recently tossed on some disc brakes, and now it just aint period correct these days. Rides fine though.
I like kleins, but where is the Fat Chance with 1 inch head tube? The owl hollow lightspeed? And the shtump jumpa with cantilevers? 1st ever with a slack headtube. So many cool vintage bikes. Cool article.
Holy cow, there's a Crosstrac Sonoma in the background!!! Where's a better photo of that rarity? Who would have thought linking your fork to your rear shock wasn't a good idea.
Modern bike designers should take note. I think current designers are all suffering from depression, most modern bikes come in dull grey. Where is the fun.
Loved seeing the vintage tires on the bikes here. I remember when XC riders broke down into two groups: those who rode Ritchey tires, and those who did not. Everyone not on Ritchey tires was an outside or poser.
Look at all that colour, compared to the piss poor colour palette of today,
they rode shit but looked damn fine, today they ride damn fine but look shit
one of the best looking hardtails ever. so bad they all cracked at the headtube. so damn beautiful with the square back end.
but my all time fave bike of the 90ies is a zaskar. preferable a 93 in turquoise. had a ball burnished one in the late 90ies before gt went bankrupt and went from awesome to sh!t.
klein attitude and adroit paintjobs are like art, so nice.
wasn't Iron Horse a Walmart bike brand (or other similar store) or am I wrong about that? B/c of their weight, I remember we always joked about those bikes being made of solid iron when we'd get one in the shop.
Iron Horse used to be a good brand. After filing for bankruptcy in 2009, they were bought by Dorel (current owner of GT, Mongoose, cannondale, and schwinn).
Yep, they made a big push on the DH scene, with the MadCatz team around 2003-ish. First with a rebranded Intense frame, then with their own "SGS" horst-link bikes. I can't speak to the quality, but they started marketing the SGS line of gravity at SportCheck and other department stores, and that was pretty much the end of the line for the SGS models.
But in the mean time, with Sam Hill and then Brendan Fairclough on board their race team, they had the first iteration of the Dave Weagle dual link, and they produced DH and trail bikes in that form for quite a few years, before disappearing. I had several friends with the famous/infamous Iron Horse Sunday frames, which were absolutely mint at first, but suffered from severe alignment issues once they moved the production to asia.
They were a bike shop brand when I was a kid and we used to sell their DH bikes in a shop I worked at in the early 2k's. Pretty sure the Sunday, donned some championship colors at one point.
That being said, for the purpose of the show, shouldn't matter if it was sold in walmart or not.
iirc, iron horse had some sort of relationship--distributor, factory, asian sales team, loan broker, i can't recall--with zebrakenko bikes, which were originally distributed in the usa by a bike shop in north haven, ct.
@giantwhip: Yep, I'm not sure if his SGS frames were modified for him, as he was first year senior at that point, but his Weagle Sundays were definitely customer Sam Hill bikes. That guy on that bike were way ahead of the competition at that point in time.
SGS DH in it's first (only?) racing year was '03 UCI DH WC overall champ under Rennie, Junior World Champ under Hill (with a crash, good enough for 3rd in seniors - do I sense a theme?). Pretty sure frames were stock. The IH Mad Catz team was stacked that year with Rennie, Hill, Graves, Atkinson.
Iron Horse goes way far back. Here's Dave Cullinan winning the 1992 DH world Championship on a Iron Horse (frame actually made by Verlicchi in Italy,used by a few brands at the time).
@powermutant: Those 03 SGS frames were stock, save for a few in which the upper shock mount had been re-drilled a touch higher up the frame to lower the bb and slack the head angle. I'm pretty sure Rennie ran his that way, but I can't speak with any certainty for the other riders. I don't know if this continued after the e13 replacement linkage kits were released. Thus concludes my weirdly specific piece of bike trivia.
Hahaha, how unfunny. The appeal of these bikes is precisely that they don't "look like sessions". But yes, it does take some observation powers to see that they are all pedal-powered vehicles with two wheels!
@funkzander: There’s one lurking in the background, I think. 12th pic down (yellow hoody on left). The right hand row of bikes goes Manitou, Klein, something, something, Yo Eddy. And the other row has a Ti-Fat.
But in all seriousness, this hits hard in the memories.
Over the next couple of years I changed literally every part on that bike until I had a complete new one.
Looking at these photos is bringing back a bunch of memories. The Alpinestars Al mega, Halson Inversion forks, Tioga Psycho tyres, the classic Konas and Tioga Disk Drives. Awesome walk down memory lane (and made better because I was too young to afford any of the bikes here at the time - even the RTS2 which was about £900 at the time I think.)
@pinkbike how about a "which would you rather have" poll?
i have the the same fork on my Foes Mono DHs 2001
Raleigh Maverick?
holy sht I forgot about that paint job... just beautiful. Yup I'd pay for a sweet paint job.
Rarity ? Pristineness ? Originality ? Age ?
Yeah we all wanted one of those Rainbow Kleins. My cousin had a beautiful sapphire blue one.
mikesee.exposure.co/the-slingshot-project
www.facebook.com/groups/565758643496358/permalink/6124574080948092
m.facebook.com/groups/565758643496358/permalink/6127144257357741
SUNN was the king of the 90's.
I like kleins, but where is the Fat Chance with 1 inch head tube? The owl hollow lightspeed? And the shtump jumpa with cantilevers? 1st ever with a slack headtube. So many cool vintage bikes. Cool article.
Who would have thought linking your fork to your rear shock wasn't a good idea.
i got the Cro Mega DX !!!! it briken but i still have it in my garage
i cant throw it
my first "real " bike !!!
I want my flouro pink, rigid Muddy Fox with its 'disc' rear wheel (bought in 1990)
Sam Hill used to ride for them
But in the mean time, with Sam Hill and then Brendan Fairclough on board their race team, they had the first iteration of the Dave Weagle dual link, and they produced DH and trail bikes in that form for quite a few years, before disappearing. I had several friends with the famous/infamous Iron Horse Sunday frames, which were absolutely mint at first, but suffered from severe alignment issues once they moved the production to asia.
So there you go.
@joebmx: just an honest question re: Iron Horse sales, not a comment on what should be in the show.
youtu.be/o-wFPQ0LbqQ?t=1024
www.instagram.com/p/CG06jKnjgLW
Here's Dave Cullinan winning the 1992 DH world Championship on a Iron Horse (frame actually made by Verlicchi in Italy,used by a few brands at the time).
youtu.be/KFxL8yQakrk
RC I believe did design some frames for Tomac during his time with Giant, but they cracked in pre season testing
m.pinkbike.com/news/bike-check-connor-fearons-world-champs-kona-operator-cr.html