The Tank™ is on a diet

As mentioned last time, I'm trying to breathe a bit of life into The Tank™, a 30yr-old steel mountain bike that has been through the mill but is seemingly indestructible.

Part of that resuscitation involves putting the whole thing on a diet, and I was quite pleased to have shaved nearly half a kilogram off last time. But why stop there? As it happens, the old girl needed new tyres, the old pair having clocked very nearly 4,000 puncture-free miles.

So my starting point was a 26 x 1.9" Schwalbe Land Cruiser on the front and a 26 x 2.0" Land Cruiser Plus on the rear. Don't ask why they were different widths - that's what happens when a bike shop only has certain tyres in stock. Anyway, they came off and a last-gen pair of new Land Cruisers went on, but narrower: 26 x 1.75". And I was amazed at the weight saving. My admittedly increasingly inaccurate luggage scale reckoned the old front tyre was 700g but its replacement was 350g. And an even bigger reduction came from changing the rear.

The upshot of all this is that The Tank™ now tips the scales at something like 13.25kg, more than a kilo lighter than it was this time last month. And because the tyres were last-gen, i.e. last year's model, they were only £11 each. So my secondary aim of rejuvenating the old girl on the cheap holds up too.

Wondering what I can do next? The seatpost is an obvious candidate but being an old-school MTB it's a funny size: 25.4mm. Don't find too many carbon posts that size. I might have to result to more rudimentary changes, as in pulling the post out and seeing if there's scope for cutting it down a bit. Now, where's my hacksaw...?

Life in the old dog yet?

You may have seen me refer to The Tank™ on here before. Well, here it is:

The only thing older and more clapped out than this bike is its rider.

For clarity, this is a Saracen Rufftrax that I bought new from Halfords in Folkestone, Kent, all the way back in 1995, for the princely sum (then) of £199.99 - as you can see, it is not all original (that's a padded but very comfortable Wittkop saddle from middle-Lidl, of all places, and Giant bar-ends, for starters) but is, for the most part, the same bike I did the 1996 London to Brighton bike ride on, incredibly.

It was starting to feel very tired though. Last October, I had to bite the bullet and find some new shifters, because I just couldn't change gear any more. I managed to find an as-new compatible Shimano set, still boxed, from an Ebayer in the US who bought them for his kids' MTBs years ago, never used them and then rediscovered them at the back of his garage. Result. They went on and suddenly I could change gear again. I put a new rear mech on at the same time.

I also upgraded the brakes, which felt like a more significant change because it meant a move away from period correctness - I swapped out the old cantilever brakes and fitted V brakes instead. I can stop a bit better now (though the gain is marginal).

I've been using The Tank™ all through the winter for commuting, which is why it's in the state it was at the weekend, propped up against the table tennis table in the back garden. But having spent time and money keeping it usable, money that could easily have bought something half-decent (and modern) on the used market, I suddenly realised that I have committed to keeping the old beast on the road. And that, having made concessions to modernisation with the change of brakes, the shackles were off in terms of other modifications.

Let's be clear, although it's technically a mountain bike, most of the time it's on the road, just in bad weather. So the fact that it weighs a tonne is an issue. Okay, not a tonne ... but I picked it up with a fairly accurate luggage scale on Saturday and it clocked 14.5kg. That's a lot, and needs to change. However, I also don't want to spend a lot on the bike. It doesn't owe me anything, but I have other bikes that I'd rather spend money improving. So, my goal is to see if there's life in the old bike yet, but do so without spending too much... and this is how I started at the weekend:

⮜	OFF:	Wittkop Medicus MTB saddle	-	430g
⮞	ON:	Giant Performance Road saddle	No cost (had it spare in the garage)	340g
⮜	OFF:	Saracen OEM alloy handlebar	-	416g
⮞	ON:	USE Atom carbon handlebar	£44.49 on Ebay	135g
⮜	OFF:	Giant Contact SL bar-ends	-	158g
⮞	ON:	Houson R15 bar-ends	No cost (freebie)	64g
⮜	OFF:	A leftover bolt from the old cantilever brakes	-	5g
Total weight saving:				460g

In other words, I battered the weight-saving rule of 1g/£, by a factor of 10! Hanging it back on the luggage scale returned a figure of 14.1kg though, so there's still work to do...

As luck would have it, The Tank™ needs new tyres. Because it is mostly used on the road, for commuting in inclement weather, I plan to downsize from 26 x 2.00 to 26 x 1.75. I'll be sticking with Schwalbe Land Cruiser Plus though, as they've served me brilliantly. The tyres have been ordered, I'll post here again when they've arrived and I've put them on. Maybe there'll be an "after" photo too, to go with the "before" above. I also plan to save a few cheap grammes with a new bottle cage. Whoop-de-doo, right?