At any rate... back at the trail head, while the typical midlife crisis nitwits were all strutting around their Trek Fuels and Stumpjumper FSRs, stroking each others egos, I approached this shiny little morsel of historic mountainbike-dom. The Schwinn Homegrown URT. Bad Ass.
Complete with long travel RS Judy and RS coil shock from back in the day, still pulling daily driver duty. Also, LX and XT parts and KORE goodies, back before KORE was a bastard import crap nameplate.
The Rock Shox Deluxe rear shock.
Factory trim, baby. Factory.
Schwinn's marketing term for sculpted stays was 'epicenter'. Beats the piss out of hydro formed.
Still has the tomato top cap. Cool.
Made in the USA! All you need to know.
4 comments:
Very cool bike from (maybe the only) cool era of (modern) Schwinn.
Control Tech made a really similar frame at the time. The Ibis Szabo used the same suspension design as well. So did the bug bucks Ibis Bow-Ti.
The "Sweet Spot" design, created by John Castellano, pretty cool for era - a smart design.
I guess we should be happy they're restoring the scrub, even if it's kind of a hassle! Gotta get that Brazilian pepper out of there...
Stephen - Actually the scrub restoration description for the project says nothing about invasive species and only says that the reason for the project is to remove pine and live oak "mechanically" I'm not really sure what that all means but it don't sound good. Travis just thinks they are selling lumber off public land and I tend to agree with him.
Dan O - Castellano also licnsed the sweet spot design to Catamount, a small company in Fort Collins Colorado. Schwinn sweet spot frames were manufactured by Control Tech, among others, but you're right, Control tech also branded the frames with their own name as well.
I remember the Catamount frames as well.
At that time, I demo'd a Ibis Szabo for the day and came close to buying one. I'll also seriously considered the Bow-Ti, even with the crazy price tag.
For some reason, out of all of 'em, the Schwinn version just looks right. It was a cool bike.
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