Reuben.Sandwich profile

This bike is so beautifully ugly! Love it!

I used to love seeing the wild creations coming out of interbike in the 90s/ early 2000s and always expected back then that gearbox bikes would have been the norm by now.

The term "rooted" has a very different meaning in Australia.

It's still a 26" v10. The first incarnation on the carbon v10 with an alloy rear so predates boost. Has Had a cracked back rim for 18 months so has been unridden as my Slayer does it all. Hard to space for boost as it's a five bolt Hope rotor.

Hope Big 'un front hub I bought in 1997. It was red but has faded. It's still in use with a 9" rotor on the front of my Syndicate V10. It started life as a QR on a GT  then a 1st gen Specialized Big Hit. Had a year in the garage then on a Banshee scirocco until it took pride of place on a murdered out (before that was a thing) Vpfree with mono6 Ti brakes in 04 which is when it grew to 20mm.  It went on a green V10.3 which I stupidly sold to get a 951. Stayed on there until I got a Chris King to match the rear hub. It then had the qr end caps machined to fit a 15mm fork and had stints on a tazer ht and a yeti 4x. Sat around again until I got bored and built it with a carbon rim on my V10. Last person to ride that bike was Loris Vergier at a SC promo and he was spinning out about the hub being almost his age! It's probably more fancy than the intent of this article but it's just such a work horse with the only bearing change happening to up size the axle!

A 230 x 65mm metric sized shock (RMB Slayer, Pivot firebird etc) is exactly 11mm shorter in both dimensions than a standard 9.5 x 3 DH shock. Jam an 11mm spacer in the negative chamber and away you go. I have converted two coil shocks thus far for my Slayer that have cost 5/8 of FA to buy and sold the first at 150% profit because it was "new" and "metric" and "so enduro".

I mated a Sturmey Archer 3 speed hub gear to a Shimano front shifter in 1997. My pub bike was dialled even though I couldn't legally go to the pub...

I'm also offering my angle grinding services to anyone that wants to shoehorn a Fox 36 internal into a 35mm Rock Shox chassis.

I had 5 King hubs in my fleet just before selling my old bike a few years back. I borrowed my buddy's king tool and gave them all a birthday. What a waste of time! One set was from 2001 and had seen AM duties mostly one set on my DH bike dates to 2008 and the lonely rear hub was a second hand DH from a young guy on the Australian Junior DH team. It had sure seen some mileage and wasn't as nice inside but boy was it still smooth! I could rebuild hubs all day long with that thing. It's just an absolute pleasure to use!

I'm running Project 321's on my Slayer now (love them!) and occasionally miss the angry bee but i love the almost -silence just as much.

More so frames than parts for me.

Kawasaki green Santa Cruz V10.3 Still the best looking DH frame ever made.

Occasionally I regret selling my Banshee Sirocco because it was cool AND had 4 pot XT brakes with stainless braided hoses and an Aireal rear hub. Aireal was a small brand here in Australia that produced some sweet hubs and ok chainguides but went bust after a few years.

Both GT LTS I've owned- a '98 3000ds and a 96 DH "boomerang" 

BTW Andrew, I still have the Chromag direct mount stem you sold me in 2010. It's now on an autographed Syndicate V10.4 that enjoys a wonderful retirement in my bike room. That bike is never leaving me!!

In Australia we call them a see-saw. Remove all your teeter totters and "replace" them with see saws that are signposted as such. That should stall the red tape brigade for another 20 years. Problem solved!

But seriously, Ladies will never be the same without it.

I'd be interested to see if would weep out through the side walls of an older maxxis like Stans does. I'm on my 3rd rear tyre and yet the front is still original 18 months later with plenty of tread. Any sealant ends up on the garage floor via osmosis.

My first job was building bikes for five bucks a pop cash in hand at Christmas time in the mid 90's. A buddy I met then said to me many years later "there's always work in a bike shop". Both he and I have fallen back on that a few times over the years... He is a bike rep, I'm an industrial electrician but we both see it as as fun sojourn between jobs/careers/relationships/countries. When I moved to 604 only to discover my Australian qualifications were not so useful, the LBS was the obvious choice. The pay sucked but the people are the pay off. Sure, there will always be a-holes to deal with but 99% of people in a good LBS (staff and customers...) are just stoked to be there!