I decided to drag my bicycle out of the shed today and fix the flat tire it’s had for quite a few months now. It’s a shame I don’t really ride it that much any more, it’s not exactly a cheap bike (although it’s not outrageously expensive either) and because I mostly take care of it, typically nothing really goes wrong with it.
I built it back when we had plenty of money, you see. I started out with a Hoffman Bikes frame (I believe it’s a 900, but it’s not the cheapo one most people review online that has a 1-pc crank) which a friend in Sacramento had tore up completely. I stripped it, cleaned off everything, and started from scratch. I kept the original bars, forks and frame and pieced together everything else. I got a really good deal on some triple wall rims and an Oddyssey 99er seat, so I stuffed those on there.
The 99er is a great saddle, despite the fact it really pounds the “glutes”. It’s covered in kevlar, and mine’s lasted several years without any scratches despite me dropping my bike at a large number of skateparks and trails. I highly recommend them – you’ll have it long enough that your ass will get used to it.
Anyway, after that I picked up a bunch of brake gear from Albes, because brakes are something that always piss me off if they don’t work right and I didn’t want to mess with them ever again. I got new levers, new U-brake kits, a new teeny-tiny upper gyro cable (because I cut the bars as narrow as I could get them, for strength) a “london mod” kit, some “knarps” and three front brake cables.
The london mod is really neat, it basically means instead of the Gyro seperating, then combining the cables, only to seperate them again (which makes extra drag, as well as being multiple points of adjustment where they can go wrong) – my brakes get split in the upper gyro cable, go through the gyro and then two discrete cables go back to the U-brake, where one acts on each side.
Some Snafu tires with flat guards, Snafu pedals and new bearings all over round it out. The result is heavy as hell, but I’ve always like heavy bikes – I have a tendency to freeze up in the middle of an air, and therefore land hard. I’ve folded a few rims, and I broke the seat tube clear off the bottom bracket on an old Haro frame, but I’ve kicked the shit out of this bike and it still works flawlessly (tire air pressure not withstanding).
Now I just have to work up the motivation to actually ride it. 
