• This topic has 65 replies, 56 voices, and was last updated 8 years ago by ziggy.
Viewing 26 posts - 41 through 66 (of 66 total)
  • Did you mountain bike before mountain bikes?
  • Sundayjumper
    Full Member

    My Dad talks of riding “Rough Stuff” in the sixties, basically just taking their touring bikes out on bridleways. Which is basically what XC was when I started riding in the eighties.

    FWIW, The Rough Stuff Fellowship still exists.

    soulwood
    Free Member

    Raleigh Bomber for me down the local fields with old tip jumps and woods full of jazz mags and glue sniffers. I broke the frame twice, it ended up with so much weld on the head tube it nearly doubled the weight. Found a replacement frame hanging up in a small cluttered dirty bike shop for £15, a loan from my grandad and that was my first foray into building bikes at the age of 15. Such memories of drilling out seized cotter pins, the constant tweaking with sturmey archer toggle chains, always getting bumped and twisted and lots of chrome polish!

    eskay
    Full Member

    Raleigh Bomber for me as well. Pretty much the same as soulwood (are you me??!).

    I bought mine second hand, snapped the frame and my dad managed to get a new replacement from Raleigh!

    My brother had a chrome one and I had a black one.

    richmars
    Full Member

    My uncle used to ride around Ash Ranges in the early 50’s. They made a track that was still visible when I lived in the area in the 70’s. Sort of off road pedal-bike speedway.

    yunki
    Free Member

    I used to do a lot of exploring back in 1066 on a horse with the hooves cut off and replaced with wooden castors.. I would regularly take the long way home on my commute (from nationwide in Swindon)and head off up Everest on my Dandyhorse, stopping at the summit to take a tot of niche grog from my STW hipflask before railing some berms on the descent.. I would make it home in time to make last orders at the pub, where I would wile away an hour or two discussing castor sizes with my chums before Shaznay the serving wench sent us on our way

    Aah.. Simpler times indeed 🙂

    Deveron53
    Free Member

    In 1976 I lived in Rugeley. I had a nice purple Raleigh Chopper and my friends (from Western Springs Junior School) had a motley collection of racing bikes and their mum’s shoppers. We started off going to Etching Hill and did some ‘downhilling’.
    The summer of ’76 was basically a long drought so rain never stopped play. We were out seemingly every day. One of our number was crazy about finding old military emplacements so we went exploring Cannock Chase. I distinctly remember cycling along the road to Birches Valley and going along the fire road to the stream crossing and then turning right up the long fire road climb that is now on the Follow The Dog Trail. When I attended the Follow The Dog opening day, the nostalgia was overpowering!
    I’m not sure parents today would give kids as much freedom. We were a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds and left the house at about 9am and didn’t return some nights until dusk.
    I wonder how many of that group apart from me still go biking?

    samunkim
    Free Member

    My Raleigh Racer & Puch Maxi Hybrid.(forks & wheels) worked quite well

    Jumped over 13 mates using a Scaffold board leant on a dumped washing machine.

    But then we got hold of Honda C90’s ( & fitted em with old MotoX tyres) and I didnt get on a pedalcycle again for 25years

    dannyh
    Free Member

    The answer is yes. Down the local gravel pits and paths on a polished Aluminium mongoose bmx. With red tyres, pads, grips and saddle. Sometimes in wellies if it was wet. Nearly always with a catapult to blast tin cans and the likes.

    I was gutted when my Mum told me about fifteen years ago that it had been sold whilst I was at Uni.

    🙁

    Nipper99
    Free Member

    This Hobo reminded me of my 70s/80s trackers.

    [url=https://flic.kr/p/eb3NNS]Bristol 006[/url] by jamesanderson2010, on Flickr

    ton
    Full Member

    1977, i was bought a second hand Carlton Corsair. drop bars, 10 gears. simplex huret gears.
    bars were swapped for cow horns, the curved brake levers never worked well with the bars.
    i scrambles, as it was called, on it for 3 years, used a load of 2nd hand wheels from doug hartley cycles in wakefield.
    in 1980 i bought a dawes galaxy tourer, and started to ride with the calder clarion. my 1st proper offroad ride was a club run over cutgate.
    mudguards, saddlebag and drops.
    the week after, i did my 1st ever timetrial on the very same bike.

    good memories. 8)

    6hours
    Free Member

    We called them Trackers too, The best ones were 26″ wheels, knobbly tyres, cross-brazed cowhorns, sturmey archer 3 speed, straight forks, small front cog, and a motorbike front brake lever.
    The forks were just normal curved ones placed between 2 planks of wood and you kept hitting the top plank with a 4lb mallet until the forks were straight and level.
    The small front cog mod required a mate whose dad had a welder. You took a normal chainset with the required pedal arm (crank) length and hacksawed the large 46 or 48 tooth cog off, making sure you didn’t go too close to the cotter-pin hole, then you gave the same treatment to a raleigh Chipper or Tomahawk chainset to get the desired 28 or 32 tooth small cog which was then welded to the long pedal arm.
    I got a Falcon Black Diamond 5 speed racer after taking the 11+ in 1976 but still enjoyed riding my tracker along the muddy lanes. Mine was somewhat lower spec than the dream list above. (single-speed Raleigh Rocket with 24″ wheels and some old bent motorbike handlebars).

    epicyclo
    Full Member

    slowoldgit – Member
    I remember taking a cheap road bike offroad in the sixties, no special kit (no money), just learned to ride without breaking things.

    Same here, although the road bike got progressively more expensive through the 60s as I got more money.

    Apart from a brief flirtation with derailleurs it was singlespeed because derailleurs broke too often.

    My favourite bike was an Andre Bertin Course C37 which had every weight weenie bit on it I could get, except I fitted it with Dunlop stainless steel rims and the fattest tyres I could (27 x1½”). My mates used to scoff at the wheels (they would be on 1″ and alloys) but I never had the problems with buckling they had.

    vickypea
    Free Member

    In the late 70s, we used to take whatever bike we had to the local woods which had lots of natural ups and downs, the biggest of which we called Devil’s Dip. Great fun.
    I had the choice between 2 unsuitable bikes- a road bike and a shopper with a basket on. My mum was forever telling me off for mistreating the bikes by riding there.

    Kunstler
    Full Member

    If Phillip Harrison hadn’t jumped on my Puch Tracker riding it down the bank into the back of Blakeney toilets, bending the forks I’d have been downhill world champion by now.

    Halfords Olympic racer – sprayed silver (with airfix black enamel detail) and added cowhorns. Ready to scramble Norfolk’s wildest.

    Had we better send out a search party for Charlie?

    sandboy
    Full Member

    Growing up in Wednesfield in the late 70’s and early 80’s we used to ride our “tracker” bikes at “Sideies” which was an area of foundry waste which had a big bomb hole which we used to ride down and get big air out of the other side. It was a natural progression to BMX. The area is now a retail park.

    colournoise
    Full Member

    Had a Chipper in the dim and distant past, but rode my Halfords road bike everywhere with no mods – loads of off-road, jumps, drops, gravel, etc. all on the drops and slick tyres.

    Would scare me s**tless today, but then it was the only bike I had so that’s what I rode. Mates did the same on their BMX/Grifter/Chopper/whatever.

    We’ve moved on so far, but not really gone any further forward…

    boobs
    Free Member

    We used to take bent forks to the local garage for”straightening” under the four post ramp. Didn’t last long.

    kjcc25
    Free Member

    My brother and I used to ride our bikes up and down the cow paths that crossed the fields on my dad’s farm back in the early 60’s. We’d call it single track now!
    I had a Dawes D’Artagnan, single speed with white wall tyres!

    http://veterancycleclublibrary.org.uk/ncl/pics/Dawes%20Super%20D%20Artagnan%20-%20Nov%2062%20(V-CC%20Library).pdf

    Used to ride my Raleigh Super Bomber (Super denoted a derailleur instead of Sturmey Archer 3sp hub gears) on farm tracks

    (not mine)

    kayla1
    Free Member

    I want a klunker now.

    tenfoot
    Full Member

    Chopper for me. It got used for off roading and jumping on the drive with bricks and planks as jumps. This kept going until the stem broke and was replaced by a Raleigh Ultra Burner.

    I can still feel the pain of nut-to-gearstick interface incidents.

    fallsoffalot
    Free Member

    Late 70’s into early 80’s i used to ride in linley woods and the ashmounds near aldridge on anything we could find and mend.linley woods also had a devils drop but the largest hill was the toboggan. amazing place to ride as a kid. Only the rich kids had bmx. My best bike was a tour de france with cowhorns.

    fallsoffalot
    Free Member

    double post

    RepackRider
    Free Member

    As far as I can find out, every kid who had access to an old bike and a dirt track rode one on the other. So did I.

    If all that was “before mountain biking,” when did mountain biking start? I would say it started when my mate and I called the bikes we built for that purpose by that name. Can’t call the sport mountain biking before you call the machine a mountain bike. My mate Gary Fisher and I came up with the name. We weren’t using old bikes, we built them new, to the same standard as a Tour de France bike

    Big difference between that and an old bike on a track

    Deveron53
    Free Member

    Oh the humanity!

    Too much deja vu. I’m off back to my hermit’s cave.

    ziggy
    Free Member

    Yay, geetar man is back!
    On a more serious note I’m glad someone did invent mtbs, now I just break myself instead of the bike.
    If it wasn’t for the mtb I wouldn’t have spent the last 28 years of my working life in the cycle trade.

Viewing 26 posts - 41 through 66 (of 66 total)

The topic ‘Did you mountain bike before mountain bikes?’ is closed to new replies.