I was going thru garage sales and used stores in Berkley when I found a couple of Trek bike frames for sale and I snatched them both, the first was built with some spare parts I had in the garage and found a new home but the other hang in my garage and was completely forgotten until recently.
Paint is completely shot, the sticker says: Trek 930 Singletrack
Turns out it’s not a 930 but a 970 in 16.5in size, a good size for my wife so here it began.
This is a budget project to turn 90s MTB into a comfortable bike packing rig.
I did almost this exact thing for a friend. He still hasn’t repainted the bike, so it’s still partially red.
The internal routing was a pain in the butt. I learned some tricks but I still hated that part. But the hardest part was routing everything through the seat stays. Probably wasn’t a good idea, but I think it looks cool.
I really wish he would paint the bike because it looks so nice to have all the guides, mounts and brake posts removed. Good Luck! It’s a super fun project.
That’s a great job, I was thinking of only doing internal on DT or TT and not in the back, also not doing whole tube but only the entrances, but I am rethinking it now based on noise (don’t want a hose banging inside a tube) and how easy it would be to pass thru.
Question, given I am adding disc brake tabs, can I remove the seatstay bridge? I feel it would be safe to remove but wanted to check, I really want it gone
If you do internal routing I would do it with full guide tubes. That eliminates rattling and makes it a lot easier to build the bike too. And the tube that sticks out can be shaped into a nice shape as well.
Don’t you want the seatstay bridge to support fenders or a lightweight rear rack?
hell yeah, 90s mtbs make great bike packers! i have (had, just sold the frameset) a 94, i think, univega that i set up for bikepacking. the only frame mods i did were add a disc tab, external housing routing, and some extra bosses to the seat tube for a pump mount, but it didn’t really need much else.
i had marino in peru make me a fork for it and i had to use a lot of spacers since the stack is so short on these old mountain bikes, but it was great.
thanks! it’s a power post, 90s parallelogram dropper from before office chair tech became the standard with telescoping posts. it puts the seat down over the top tube in the low position, nice and out of the way
This bike will never have a rear rack or fenders, and if in the future I change my mind I can always add it back or make a custom rack.
Was the seatstay bridge only for those purposes? I know it helps with rigidity for rim brakes but now that I have decided to move to disc brakes I think I can go without, I simply like the look better.
I have those aluminum removable cable guides that uses a bottle boss to hold, but my fear is that the tubes are very thin in the center where one of the bosses would end up going, from my research it seems the 970 was triple butted so I am unsure of the thickness of the tubing.
