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...?
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