Turning mountain bike into a cruiser thingy

Afternoon
Now don’t ask me why,but I’ve got a hankering to play about with my old mountain bike,Carrera fury if it makes any difference.
I want to powdercoat it,get some of them chrome Dutch cruiser type bars,leather grips and sprung leather saddle,and go singlespeed.
I want it for bimbling along the canal or on the cycle tracks,on nice summers evenings-assuming we get any summers evenings of course.
Now,the bit I’m struggling to visualise is this,will it look daft with disc brakes on it? Will the levers and reservoirs look out of place on those bars? And what about the discs?
Only other alternative is to look out for a cheap bike and do that up.
Thoughts,opinions?

Ta

The bars/stem will be more of a trick to pull off than aesthetics of disks and lever. With the head angle / trail of a mountain bike frame and fork putting that style of bar on will have the same effect on handling as putting your stem on backwards. Which might be ace – try it. 🙂

To get that sort of hand position you need bars that sweep forwards first before they turn back otherwise they’ll be around your knees

💡 Schwalble 2.35″ Crazy Bob tyres (or Big Apple), On One Mary bar, coiuld go fixed and ditch the rear brake.

Those Mary bars are just what I was thinking off thanks,already seen those tyres when I was having a nosey round earlier,like em in cream or brown. Never thought about losing one of the brakes,that could be an idea.

handle bar mounted coffee cup holder from CTBM

coiuld go fixed and ditch the rear brake.

not without some solution for tensioning the chain, given a fury won’t be blessed with horizonal dropouts or an ebb. Anyway a cruiser would want a coaster brake. (you can’t have one of them either for the same reason)

^ he speaks the truth unless you go down the WI rou£e and invite Eccentric Eric to the party

It has vertical ish dropouts. I thought I could use a chain tensioner? And I don’t want it to be fixed.
But would it look ok or just plain silly?

I thought I could use a chain tensioner?

for single speed yes but for fixed no.

But would it look ok or just plain silly?

Look at any pictures of bikes with Marys on and decide for yourself – its subjective. Personally I’ve got a bike that I did pretty much the same thing with – flat powdercoat grey, single speed with a shiny stainless chain, no graphics, rigid exotic forks – the shortest I could get -, brown fat alberts. I ditched the disks and went back to V brakes because I had them and because I think they look nicer. I stopped short of swept back bars and a big sprung seat becuase thats a ‘look’ that I associate with much slacker angled bikes. Big wide sprung saddles are for bikes you sit up and back on, if you look at people riding dutch bikes they are pretty much in a standing reading the paper position rather than a hunched MTB position – the narrow saddles we use are because our weight is on our hands not our arses. That kind of bar and saddle are for much shorter top tubes and slacker head and seat angles

So I stuck with a conventional bar and saddle – sort of a big bmx

Mary Bars – check
D.I.Y. Single speed – check
Bimbling along canal- check
Used ‘V’ brakes as opposed to discs andit now has a matching orange saddle.
Great for cruising – pop some spd’s on and it’s not too bad for other rides (just needs a better engine)

Is that a tensioner or an ordinary derailleur ?

One thing to point out (being a mechanic, I’ve ridden a million MTB to commuter / cruiser style conversions over the years) is that the seat tube angle on a mountain bike is much steeper than a cruiser. So if you have high bars (and even worse with a backsweep) and a short stem, the handling feels dreadful. Your ass is push forward and your hands pushed back. You could look into fitting a layback seatpost if you want the bike to have a proper cruiser feel though.

(fitted the saddlebag as a bit of a joke, hence the saddle being a bit high…)

BA what’s that thing like to ride?. That’s the image I have in my head,obviously with a mtb frame it’s gonna look lots different to that.

Is that a tensioner or an ordinary derailleur ?

It’s an old rear mech used as a tensioner – works really well. You pop a short length of cable with the end nipple still intact into the barrel adjuster. Clamp it up, as you would for a geared set up,you can use it to fine tune the chainline.
What you can’t see is that the single gear at the back is made from 2 old cassettes taken apart with all but one cog discarded. Cogs are then replaced by the spacers either side of the one remaining cog (works best on 9 or 7 speed hubs – i’e 4 or 3 spacers either side instead of cogs). Dressed it with a bit of black duct tape and jobs a good ‘un. Easy, cheap and works perfectly.

Walleater,that looks good,something like that could work for me.
I think I’ll have a nosey around the web for some pics to give me more of an idea,and see what parts I could get to build it.

This was mine 😀

until some **** nicked it. I miss it 🙁

BA what’s that thing like to ride?.

awful, but at least you won’t have to deal with stuff like coaster brakes. You should be ok for canal cruising, but it might be all wrong for anything resembling a hill.

Mine looks like this now, which is the oppsite of what you are trying to achieve ie a cruiser frame with all MTB bits. It’s still awful to ride.

Qwerty,that looks nice,and it gives me a good idea of how mine could look,I’ve got the same forks on it as you have already. It looks good with those bars too.

Yunki,I’ve got a knackered shoulder,I couldn’t lift my bloody arms that high 😀
B.A. If they’re as awful as that to ride,I think I’ll settle along the lines of doing something like qwerty has done