My friend Travis has been a load of help in our many recent home repair projects. He helped me with my bathroom walls, with the demolition of the back porch, with the contractor for the replacement porch, and in general with just about every stupid question I could come up with! To repay him, I bought him a VooDoo HooDoo mountain bike frame from ebay, and then hooked him up with about 900 bucks work of components for cheap. Barter System, baby!
We had mounted the fork a while back, and this week I loaned him some bottom bracket tools (because really, the bottom bracket and headset are the only parts of a bicycle that require specialized tools to build) and he did the rest. The final product looks great, and most of the parts are new,and the ones that aren't are from the Cannondale Rush that I dismantled and sold, so they have maybe 200 miles on them. The Bike has Sram XO drive train, Avid BB7 discs, Race Face headset and a nice SDG seat. I'd value the bike new from a shop floor at somewhere around $1400-1500 or so, considering the components and frame and such. (we've got maybe $950 total in it...about $700 of that from Travis' pocket, $300 to me for parts and 200 for the fork and 200 for wheels and other ancillaries.) At that price point, only the suspension fork, a Rock Shox Tora (usually spec'd on bikes in the $1100-1200 range) could be considered the weak link. That's not very fair to the Tora though, because it is a fully adjustable coil sprung and dampened fork only hampered weight wise by steel stanchions instead of the lighter alloys found in the Recon, the next fork up in the RS line. Hardly anything to cry about, and something that you'll never feel on the trail. Actually, considering that my Revelation is such a noodle with its alloy stanchions, the Tora may actually feel more accurate and direct on the trail! (I'll be bummed if my Rev feels like a floppy puddle of snot in comparison, and Travis will probably never let me live it down.)
Travis is already talking smack about dusting me on the trails...We shall see...
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