Some of you may know that I am hoping or planning to participate in a long cycling-centered event in May. It’s mostly offroad and necessitates some on-bike luggage and a for-me high degree of self-sufficiency. I anticipate writing a small post about the planning and so on, but I am still deciding on what bicycle to ride, and this post is about that.

My top contender is my, uh, second-most-recently-acquired ride. It’s a 1997 Gary Fisher (read: Trek) X-Caliber. As I said, a future post will probably go into the parts list. But a little bit about the thing:

I bought it last fall on the Swiss version of craigslist/ebay for 75 CHF. The historian in me was a little sad to scrape off the insurance stickers on it dating back to the year of its purchase (1998, I think), but it needed to be done, so that the rest of the world could enjoy the classic logo, a buff marlin on a bike.

It was in a state just functional enough for me to ride it home from Oberenstringen or something like that, where we met the seller (a friendly paterfamilias type). The front derailleur couldn’t shift into the big ring (it’s a triple, duh). I assumed the reason was that the derailleur cable had frayed down to a single strand. I later found that the limit screw was adjusted to prevent shifting into the big ring, possibly because the front derailleur was mounted too high, so the chain had a tendency to fly over the big ring during otherwise normal operation.

The upper cup of the headset had a black plastic dust cover that was cracked open. You could remove it with your hand and look at some crusty ball bearings. It had a Rockshox Judy on it, a suspension fork from the 90s that has since been updated. I had no intention of keeping this, not least because I am nearly completely illiterate about servicing suspensions, let alone elastomer ones. It had bar-ends on a shoulder-width flat bar. Anyway, I rode it home (my roommate took a publibike).

I had the professionals change the headset for me. The new one’s a little on the gucci side, but it looks great, doesn’t leak grease, and the bearings are hidden from sight. I exchanged the classic tiny flat bar (and ends) for a goofy Seine bar from Velo Orange. (It’s an experiment.) But I’ve kept the original (twist grip) shifters, derailleurs, and big chainring, which appears to have been pretty well preserved thanks to that adjustment of the limit screw. (I originally intended to replace it. But the replacement I got on ebay had some tolerance issue which meant that I couldn’t get all 5 crank bolts into it. Color me skeptical that I bought a legit part. Or at least perplexed.) I put on a (beautiful Soma) steel fork. I replaced the wheels, too, because the braking surfaces on the rear were u-shaped from wear. The front brake appears to have been untouched. More on the wheels another time. I’m keeping the original v-brakes and amazing s-wave levers.

I took it to work once, and I found out that I hadn’t done as good a job with the derailleur adjustments as I thought. I sent the chain over the big chainring at Bucheggplatz–a like 3-4 lane roundabout with a bus stop and a tram stop in the middle–due to the greater wisdom of Swiss traffic engineers it is not actually very chaotic, but it’s still a stressful place to work on a bike. Anyway, I finally got around to adjusting the height of the front derailleur, and then I went back and did everything again, and it works pretty well now. So we took it for a spin on a lovely spring day (in February), and it was a blast. The thing rips.

I am nearly very happy with it all. It was a sweet bike back in 1997, and it’s still a sweet bike. The to-do list is now pretty short: de-squeal the front brake and figure out some kind of dynamo wiring solution that isn’t worse than zip ties.