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I'm looking for a budget winter bike for urban duties. Needs to be 26" & can take 2" tyres & mudguards. Any ideas?
Sounds like a decent, 20 year old mountain bike off ebay/fb marketplace to me. Spend more/ get lucky on condition of consumables, but spare a budget for cables, drivetrain, guards. Maybe tyres and bars too, depending how picky you are.
Carrera Subway - used to be 26", might be 27.5 now
Head over to retrobike.co.uk and put up a wanted ad. You'll get loads of offers for different budgets.
Trawl gumtree and you'll find what you need. Just filter out the stolen from the legit and you're golden
If you want new then the Carrera is good. Also go outdoors do an excellent rigid with discs. Or at least they did, much cheapness
How budget? I have a P7 on Cromotos and Alfine 8 gathering dust, would be ideal if it's going between safe places.
Otherwise as suggested a Carrera Subway would be ideal, they're 10 a penny. See also Ridgeback, Dawes and Revolution.
I'd go for what was decent hardtail from about 2005 onwards, when disk brakes started to become universal, or something higher end from about 2000. Plenty of bargains about. (GT Zaskar, Kona Kula, Inbred)
If you don't mind cantis old 90s Konas and Marins are everywhere and are really good.
This is exactly why I got my gen1 Soul, perfect. I bought it as kind of a time capsule of early 2000s parts but you can get really nice 26 inch parts for peanuts, nobody wants em so frinstance I got a set of the exact same Roval traversee wheels I had on my original soul back in 2010, for I think £60, and finished it off with random 9-speed parts I found in the shed. Then slightly ruined it with some 2.5 wheelie bike slicks which honestly don't work as well as a proper 26 inch road tyre would, but look bloody amazing. Steer clear of popular "retrobikes", Konas and suchlike, not much point in spending the retro tax.
Only thing to bear in mind is, well... Old mountain bikes were a bit shit. I mean, I had a gen2 Soul bitd, exactly the same geometry, even the same wheels and fork, and I loved it, we didn't know any better at the time. I did an SDA round on it ffs. But the second I got on this new one it was like, this is twitchy and short and horrible. Even on the road it feels short and cramped (but if I'd gone up a size it looks weird, because as well as being shit all old mountain bikes bigger than a medium looked weird) You can't go back.
Get on Gumtree or local bike recycling place. Job jobbed.
My rigid singlespeed inbred?