I was in the middle of taking pictures of this bike when my phone died. The bike has a schwinn logo stamped into the rear drive side dropout. It has seat "stays" similar to the picture below, where the seat stays meet before the seat tube and meet the seat tube as a single... stay... The bike is a mountain bike with a sloping top tube, 26" wheels. It currently doesn't have suspension, but I'm not sure if it came that way.

EDIT: This is NOT the actual bike...


The difference occurs in that my bike has "widened" stays to accommodate wider tires. (So there is a bulge where the tire is.)

The bike has the seat post clamp built into the frame with the bolt in the front, which is something I don't generally see.

The serial number of the bike is M5GH30223. It's the GH in the middle that's confusing me. I'm guessing it's a 95 schwinn... something. It's been repainted (well) so none of the original decals are there.

Apologies for no pictures, phone battery died.

The reason we want to identify it is that it's odd.. we can't seem to find a FD that'll fit it and work correctly. The BB shell seems to be 70mm as well.

To my knowledge, the most modern bikes of the original Schwinn empire would have looked something like this:




So the mono-stay was something developed after Schwinn's bankruptcy.

Based on your description, it might be one of the mid 1990s Homegrown frames:

Schwinn catalogs, 1991 - 2000 (254 of 577)

The serial number is the format of Merida of Taiwan. Merida start using this format sometime in the late 1980s.

The first digit "5" is for the year of manufacture of the frame, so 1995 or possibly 2005.