Summer is for biking. Found a cool bike the other day just in time to get it cleaned up and adjusted for today's sunny weather.
It is a Ritchey, but it hard to suss out which model. TIG welded Japanese frame, clearly a Ritchey design from handle bars to rear derailleur, but with a decidedly odd, lugged flat-crown fork. It looks a lot like the design found on Diamondbacks a few years earlier. Paint matches though, so signs point to it being the original fork. The Old Mountain Bikes registry only has one model that resembles this one and there are a few differences in decal placement and that model is sporting TA cranks.
Otherwise the spec is similar: Shimano 600 EX crankset, freewheel and "starfish" headset, early Deore XT "Deerhead" derailleurs, cantis, shifters and the high-flange hubs that seemed to have only been around for a year or two. Also odd: The Selle Italia Anatomic seat in place of the Avocet found on most other Ritcheys.
But that lugged fork is really odd -- Ritchey pioneered the unicrown fork and that was the predominant spec for most Ritcheys until suspension forks took over. Ritchey also made the biplane fork famous and thus heavily imitated (twice over, in some ways, with Grant Peterson's help). This one is neither -- a faux biplane, lugged number. Grant Peterson and Bridgestone did have some good thing to say about flat crown forks like this though.
There were a few fully lugged Ritcheys imported to Canada that are common enough for there to be lots of information about them. Those bikes were Ritchey-designed but made by Toyo (great builder) out of Japan and imported to Canada by a then fledgling Rocky Mountain Bikes, who had worked a distribution deal out with TR. This was around the time the Gary Fisher and Tom Ritchey split off from their joint venture, and the story is that Tom Ritchey was looking for new distribution partners and Rocky Mountain stepped in for Canada. It seems like that turned out to be a fruitful relationship over the ensuing years, but more on that another time.
Fun ride! Pretty agile despite the long wheel base and the "lazy" seat tube and head tube angles. And pretty light. Feels like the bike comes in at lower than the 28 lbs. that Ritchey lists for its heavier models. Cruising on old steel to start the summer!
