What ‘mountain bike’ did you ride in the 70s?

Where I lived in South West London/Surrey, THE setup to have was any old frame, single speed using some high flange hubs with rear flip flop (oddly with 16T both sides) and a 32T chaining, straight (if you had a wealthy family) or straightened (the rest of us) forks, no front brake, and of course the knobbliest tyres you could find! Handlebars were free (some liked straight bars, cowhorns were fairly popular, and some like me preferred what I’ve seen referred to as North Road on Wikipedia.

Must look through mums old albums see if I can’t find a photo.

10spd Raleigh road bike fitted with cow-horn handlebars with multi-coloured insulating tape for grips! And the obligatory tyres worn down to the canvas.

It was an awesome bike for wheelies!

To be honest kids hadn’t heard of mountain bikes in the 70’s the nearest thing was probably a Grifter! Didn’t stop is riding in the local woods though.

Wow, you must have been proper well off…gears? Lol. My boring friend had a Sturmy Archer 3-speed shopping bike mind.

It’s coming back to me, we used to call them ‘track bikes’ and the ‘in crowd’ had chrome forks…tarts.

Skids and wheelies, those were indeed the days!

Never heard of MTB in the seventies. I had a racer with cowhorns, the gears were junked and chained fix on middle cassette ring.

First mtb came in the late eighties, claud butler incorrectly delivered and never collected so I had it.

Got stolen a year later so guess that was karma but I was hooked by then.

I had a Raleigh Olympus 5 speed, fitted with some free handlebars off a Honda 125 trials bike (!) from Ken Martins motorbike shop. Many a happy time spent razzing around the local field & paths, using old doors on bricks as take off ramps. Plenty of crashes, but at that age (early teens) you just bounce….

Happy days!! 🙂

70s…off road…same as on road

Raleigh Grifter, I remember it was very stable in the air. Unfortunately the forks parted company with the frame and that’s when BMX made sense.

10spd Raleigh road bike fitted with cow-horn handlebars

this.

like this bike but with gears.

brakes were always a bit dodgy as the drop bar levers tended to hit the bar before the brakes were full yon.

Chopper 8)

WTF am I doing wearing a Spurs football T shirt for?

Mine too was an orange raleigh commando like in picture above.

Endless amount of fun round the canal towpaths.

I had a Raleigh Grifter, which got nicked. Then I got a Raleigh Super Bomber – which was pretty mtb’ish. Before bmx took hold..

Raliegh Boxer and Striker

@wwaswas

geds bike 😀

We called them Scramblers back in the late 70’s. Mine was a 24″ wheeled racer fitted with cowhorn handlebars, just a back brake, 5 speed on the back, fitted with 26″ forks for that chopper look, and black 1′ 3/8 tyres. We used them for mainly skidding and wheelies + a little dirt road riding up in Pine Forests at Formby, Merseyside.

Wow, that ‘Supreme’ bike is almost a dead ringer for the stuff we used to ride. We weren’t savvy enough to have forks angled forward mind, so it wasn’t entirely unheard of to be banging ones pedals into the front wheel on turning! Yeah, and cotterless wasn’t out (or certainly rare if it was), so pedal-clank, pedal-clank, pedal-clank was pretty frequent. Grrrr.

pastcaring – the power of Google and ’70’s cow horn bars’

🙂

It was always ‘scrambling’ for us too.

ged built that up (out of a brooklyn gansta track) to remind himself of he’s ‘yoof’

he told me when they were kids, they’d straiten there forks by putting them into a drain cover and just bend them until strait 😯

Good thread!
My scrambler was a Raleigh Hustler (carrying on that fine vehicle naming tradition started by Ford 😀 ) with cowhorns and knobblies. Seem to remember it having translucent green grips which clashed oh so nicely with the purple paint and yellow grpahics!

In the ’70s I had a cheap ‘n’ nasty Lew-ways Apache – bit of a Chopper copy, for scrambling duties, followed by a Raleigh Burner.

Early 70s (well, maybe about 1969) (me in the double-breasted)

Mid 70s (a Puch?) (the other fella is me mum.)

Ah yes its all coming back…Cowhorns, Grifter, scrambling.

I did have a full suss in the 70’s briefly….It was like a scrambler motorbike without the engine but with pedals. Unfortunately it weighed a ton so my dad sold it in the Manchester Evening news classifieds

10spd Raleigh road bike fitted with cow-horn handlebars

+1.. wanted a raleigh bomber though

i used to rag a small 5 speed racer frame fitted with raliegh shopper wheels round the local woods, too many punctures from unsuitable tyres was the biggest problem.

formby pinewoods great early scrambling in the late 70,s ,my bike handling was much better then !

😳

. . . in my defence, mine did have chequer flag tape everywhere 😆 . . . oh, and playing cards in the spokes.

For all but 6 months of the 70’s I rode around in me Mam’s belly.

something like this (but blue with a picture of a pink elephant on saddle 😉 well i was born in 1975

one of these fitted with cowhorns

a 29er

it is i suppose……………fashionista me 8) 😉

DezB – you owe me another drink because you’ve just made mine come out of my nose.

Another Raliegh Grifter (although that might have actually been very early 80’s?).

Still feel the pain from knees spacking the handlebars due to the stupid SA “slip” gears. Bent the forks on mine almost to the point of snapping. Blame that on 4meters of big air then landing a bike made from depleted uranium.

I had a trike like that and me mum had a Raleigh Twenty. In 1979 I got a Vindec 5 speed racer.

Some of those bikes must have been very uncomfortable and probably a little unmanageable off-road 😯

lol i had the same mamadirt thou i removed the mudguards, light, stand and rack etc. it was a hand me down from my sister. 🙂

Halfords Trackstar with proto soft rubber soled footwear:

Old racers with cowhorns here. For extra gnarr on the dirt jumps a Grifter back wheel could be fitted. Made wheelies easier.
I remember all sorts of bodges with jubilee clips to keep the sturmy archer hub in 1st gear, and fabricating a brake hanger our of fencing wire for the useless centrepull caliper.
They mainly used to snap at the head/down tube junction, or the top of the forks folded forward on landing.
Ah memories!

Some of those bikes must have been very uncomfortable and probably a little unmanageable off-road

folk were built of much sterner stuff in those days..

Biggest fear was always sliding forward off the saddle if you stopped suddenly. There was very little standover.

One of my friends had a cunning plan and angled his saddle up at the front to help prevent this.

Needless to say he slid if the back of the saddle in a fast downhill section and landed on the back tyre. I’ve never seen someone stop so quickly purely by slamming their gonads into their seat stay and then sitting on their back tyre mute with pain.

In the 70s I had a stock puch “racer”

More into the 80s really I used a 531 10 sp “racer” – actually probably an old training frame for a real racer as it had campag record hubs with tubs.

I inverted and cut off the drops, fitted cyclocross tubs with a bit of knobble, wide ratio block and off I went. Loads of RSF style riding. I still have this bike and resurrected it recently. I cannot believe I used to ride it off road