Originally Posted by
Trevtassie
When you can scrounge a new through axle wheel to fit your modern hard tail from a hard waste rubbish pile on the side of the road, or fit a front rack to the suspension forks without going through some stupid engineering involving hose clamps and good luck or a very deep wallet, then you can talk about practicality and modern hardtails in the same sentence.
Yeah, modern hardtail bikes have nice design and ride way better off road, but that's not what the OP was talking about...for sheer practicality ie keeping a bike running for next to nothing, while carrying a ton of stuff, not worrying about it being stolen, you can't beat an old early nineties MTB. You can grab a decent one, cludge on some racks and tour the world, knowing you'll likely be able to fix it nearly anywhere, probably for free.
If you want to talk about scrounging for wheels, I would reconsider this nostalgia for late 80s early 90s era mtb frames. Dropout widths varied (I believe you had 126, 130, and 135?), and I assume you also found a mix of freewheel and cassette hubs. Maybe the roadside solid waste piles in your area are better stocked than mine.
You will have a far, far greater chance of easily finding what you need for a HT built in the late 90s through early 2010s. 135mm QR were ubiquitous through the late 2000s and still common on HTs into the early 2010, and there was basically just one freehub standard that could fit any 7 through 10 speed cassette, and 11 speed mtb HG cassettes (at least for any bike worth restoring)
A 2007 Karate Monkey blows the doors off of any bike from 1990 in terms of ease of finding parts to get it on the road. There is no shortage of used 135mm 29er wheels out there.
I am seeing a lot of people making the false dichotomy between a bike from 1990 and 2020. There are 30 years worth of bikes in between. A HT from between the late 90s through early 2010s is going to be a lot easier for the average person to get parts for and get on the road than one from 1990.
What parts are going to be easier to find for a 1990 HT than a 2005 HT? Or a 2010 HT? If you don’t want suspension, stick a rigid fork on there.