We were young and experimental, what can I say?

It’s the Mountain Goat Whiskeytown Racer FS.

Mountain Goat was one of the better small frame builders from the early days of mountain biking.  Their bikes were known as excellent for racing, and for their eye-searing custom paint.  And the Whiskeytown was named after a popular point to point race - something that I don’t think exists in the mountain bike world anymore.

But this full suspension bike is really quite awful.  For starters, it just looks like it would flex like mad.  Maybe that trellis-like rear section isn’t really that bad, but it really looks sketchy.

Even worse though is the elastomer spring.  In this case, it looks like a threaded rod attached to the swingarm compresses the elastomer elements that sit below a plat attached to the frame.

That’s my best guess as to what’s happening anyway.

I really am glad for these early adopters by the way.  Someone had to try things, and fail, so that we could figure out which ways worked.

I’m still going to make fun of the bad ones though.

My next nomination for worst suspension bike ever is a design that eventually worked well, but with the technology available in 1992, it just wasn’t quite there.

Fisher RS-1

I have to say, the RS-1 looked great.  It was designed by Mert Lawwill, member of the American Motorcycle Association hall of fame, and the Mountain bike hall of fame.  His signature linkage design was later featured on the Schwinn Four Banger and Straight Six, and Yeti DH bikes.

The problem is that in 1992, cantilever brakes were the industry standard, and there was just no way to make them work on this suspension design.  So, they had to create a disc brake for it too.  

It didn’t work all that well.

And like the Trek 9000, it had elastomer strings, but these were tiny.

These look like they might be good for a softtail-type arrangement, but certainly not for a genuine full suspension bike.

So, the Fisher was ahead of it’s time for sure - but once shocks and disc brakes became useful, then it proved to be a solid deisgn. But the RS-1 was not good.

The modern full suspension bicycle, after a good twenty some years of development, is very well sorted out.  Back in the day, the first wave of “long travel” bikes - the so-called “freeride” bikes - had only four inches of wheel travel, and didn’t really pedal that well.

Today, four inches is for XC race bikes.  Efficient pedaling, six inch travel trail bikes are the norm, and DH race bikes have eight and nine inches of travel.

Of course, in order to get to this sorted out age we live in now, we had to go through some growing pains.  There are a few very bad bikes I’ll be documenting here, and the first one I’ll talk about is the Trek 9000.

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I don’t know how I didn’t know this, but I just found out now that Laurent Fignon was dead.

Turns out that he died of cancer two years ago.  I can’t figure out how I didn’t know this.

Fignon won the Tour de France twice, Milan-San Remo twice, and The Giro once.

Although, he may be best known for losing.

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You don’t see these in North America very often, because they were never sold here (to my knowledge anyway) but the UK VRC guys love em;

It’s an Orange Clockwork from 1991 or 92, and it’s just so perfect.

New stuff is great - suspension, dropper seatposts, carbon cranks - but this, this is better.

Steel, wishbone rear end, skinwall tires, full Shimano XT group (the seatpost even!) with thumbshifters, anodized rims, great colours.

This has to get a 10.

I don’t know why but the city of Detroit has been a fascinating subject for me.  So when I read about Shinola of Detroit last night, I was interested.

When I found out they made watches and leather goods in addition to bicycles, I was very interested.

The Shinola Bixby.

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