Downhill bike

HEy Tony, how much you looking at spending?

I've had pretty good luck hunting for used frames out of the US via pinkbike.

Also 7point is a nice frame for sure, but being IH, parts for them are near imposible to get now from what I heard.

I have my whole M1 fully built and will let it go for 850. That's a nutters deal for a really able bike.

XTR cranks

CK Headset

Avid Code Brakes

Maxxis Minion Tires

5th element w/ ti spring

travis fork.

loads more goodies...

get @ me .. ..

Headset: Deal with that when you get the frame you're after, its pretty easy, frame will be one  of three things, 1 1/8, E2 (1.5 at the bottom, 1 1/8 at the top) or straight 1.5. If you're building a DH bike, no doubt you'll end up with dual crown fork which are all 1 1/8 (AFAIK), so once you have your frame and fork picked, the right head set will fall into place, be it staight 1 1/8, 1.5 reducer or a combination of the two (E2 frames).

Chain line: 83mm bb and 150mm rear, put it together as per instruction with bb and you're good, no voodoo there.

Note I have never bought a complete bike lol, to me, specifying and building the bike for your own taste is part of the fun in DH, or MTB in general.

So for me the process is:

- Figure out what you're looking for geo and feature wise (eg continuous seat tube was a key for the last two frames I found)

- Find frames that match or ask dudes at mtbr or RM for ideas, if you've done some reasearch and don't go on there asking "what bike", but are a bit more specific with your requirements, there is a wealth of knowledge there.

Hit pinkbike and don't be scared to import and you can end up with some sweet deals on a huge variety of frames.

Once you have your frame, that kinda dictates things like bb shell width, rear axle spacing.

Of course if you're going in with some parts already, like say you have a mint 1.5" totem for example, and wish to keep it, then that will drive some of the frame requirements.

Thanks for the tips Eric. The headset sizing seems to be a little more complicated than just the steerer dimensions though, there's also the head tube inner diameter. I've been looking over the S.H.I.S. information (which seems like a damn fine idea to me) and it should be ok once I have the HT inner diameters of the frame along with the fork steerer. Given the rain, it's a perfect weekend for more research!

Cheers Chris. It's the little bits and pieces left over at the end that worry me :-) I'm just trying to sort out the appropriate brake adaptor at the moment. However I think I'll wait until the credit card stops smoldering before going any further. 

The swing arm has IS brake tabs so I need a IS to postmount adaptor. Not sure why they're still using IS, I guess it allows you to run any size rear brake rotor if you wanted to run something smaller than 203mm?

A retro-80s yellow TR250 frame is currently heading my way! Yeehaa :-)

ps. My money's on a new Saint groupo being released pretty shortly. The new XTR and now XT are out and everywhere you look Saint stuff is on special. Anyone seen any rumours?

Thanks to all for the comments and encouragement. It took a couple of weeks but the bike came together (at the very last moment, ie Friday arvo in the Sugarloaf campground!) and is so sweet. The process was sometimes frustrating (eg watching yet more air come out of the factory-bled brakes) but very satisfying. The bike is quite different from my '05 Reign and so took lots of runs down Sugar Momma to work out how it tipped into corners, how crazy-powerful the brakes are, and to try and get some baseline settings on the suspension (that is going to take me ages to get sorted). I had the inevitable miscalculation but thankfully the bike is built tougher than I! By Sunday lunch I was really having fun. Weight is spot on 40lbs. Many thanks to Hub for busing a rim to me pronto and Rob at CS for building the wheels up for me the night before!

Next stop, the Gorge.

Fox DHX RC4, Marzocchi 66 RC3 Ti, E13 DH cranks, Formula Mega brakes, half-bald Highrollers :-/

I have Saint shifting. It is very nice indeed. The finger release for an upshift is a bit harder than I'd like, although that may free up a bit as it wears in. The shifting is bang-bang-bang on. Really nice. I was going to get the Saint brakes but found some Formula Megas even cheaper (they've been discontinued now although they use parts from the One and R1 so they shouldn't be a problem to source). They are insanely powerful (though I guess everything is compared to the 9s on my Reign!) and I was catching myself out a lot by dragging the brakes like I used to. Dangerous. This bike is going to take a fair bit of relearning.

Thanks! No I was there the week before, it just took me a while to get the photos off jmvl and post them up. Unless the queues have become very long, I don't think we could of gone the weekend without running into each other! How were the trails this weekend?

I did get to the Range on Saturday for some more suspension fiddling. Mostly pretty wet but Porcupine Sleeper was awesome (there's a big tree down at the start though).

I'd love to Nimz but I've suddenly got an offer to go to the UK and that will probably spread into that weekend. Work cutting into riding time? Outrageous!

Maybe he's going over to 'clean things up'?

so - have you "picked up" any new hardware yet?