for some time now, i've been searching locally for an old steel road or mountain bike to put fat tires and wide drop bars on so that this summer i can go get lost in the woods for a few days. i live in a rural town on the oregon coast, and our craiglist and facebook marketplace scenes are pretty terrible when it comes to old bikes. i poke my head into the thrift stores pretty regularly too, and at best sometimes i'll find a rust overpriced bso that i want nothing to do with.
with summer coming in hot, i was getting a bit desperate. one night, after having a few too many, i was poking around on ebay and saw this old univega mountain bike frame with the max mudroom chain stays in the same color fade as the kid down the street from me had in the 90s that i was always so jealous of. it was covered in terrible stickers and looked like it might have a little rust in the bottom bracket shell, but i had to have it. and now i do!
univega alpina s6.7
univega alpina s6.7
the bb rust is just minimal surface rust and will clean up no problem, the threads are great.
i was and am excited to get started on this build, however right out of the box i discovered that the auction stating that the frame was "dent free" wasn't quite the case. there's a pretty good dinger in the downtube, and a couple super minor ones in the toptube. i was pretty bummed, but i reached out to the guy i got it from and he refunded most of the cost of the frame back to me, so i'm happy with that. i'm still not sure i would have picked this up had i known about the downtube dent though.
for the sake of not hosting a bunch of pictures of a few dents on bikeforums, here's a link to a gallery of pictures of the dents i sent to the guy i got the frame from -
https://imgur.com/a/pQNr9fI
they are pretty hard to make out with all the stickers over them, but they are definitely there. i'll take better pictures once i've removed the stickers.
i have a few parts for it already, but next up is to find a rigid fork in the 410-420 atc range, hopefully with a bunch of mounting points. kinda looking at surly here, but i'm pretty open right now. while i'd love to be riding this bike this summer, i don't have much in the way of a budget, and i have another weirdo bike that i can ride if this one doesn't get done in time, but i'm sure going to try!
i love build threads, who doesn't love build threads?