Something for beardo’s to stroke their beards to whilst circling and nodding their heads in appreciation.
Classic Rare Road Touring Bike Nishiki Mudguards 80’S | eBay
Disraeli Gears description of that Suntour derailleur.
[i]SunTour’s first mountain bike design, the MounTech had been a masterpiece of technical complexity and sophistication - disastrously let down by reliability problems. The SunTour XC was the second design. The basic SunTour XC was a rock-crusher of a derailleur, over-size and over-built in every area. It was as simple as a knife and fork, with one sprung pivot and no fancy features, even the styling and branding were deliberately plain and straight forward.
So what in heaven’s name is this? SunTour were wrestling with the demands of the new mountain bikes, with their triple chainsets and huge gear capacities. They hated the very long pulley cages, which had limited ground clearance and irritating chain slap - so they invented the ‘3 Pulley System’. With one brilliant stroke it gave huge capacity with a relatively short cage. Ground clearance was restored, chain slap minimised.
Fantastic - except for the fact that it looked so weird that, as you cycled by, dogs barked, babies cried and your friends laughed. At you, not with you.
Sales were lamentably slow.[/i]
Overpriced for what it is.
I have a buddy who has one of these, but it’s tange 2 and has flat bar conversion, way better condish.
I agree.
I reckon $200ish, considering what you’d need to spend to make it decent.
Careful about assuming thinner tubing is better for a touring bike. Tange 2 is more or less in line with Columbus SL or thinner grades of Reynolds 531. Such tubing isn’t desirable on a touring bike where extra weight is loaded onto it and may lead to a compromised function (noodly, not strong enough, tricky on descents).
Tange Infinity is fine and in fact preferable for this bikes purpose. Reynolds made 531 in ST grade (thicker - Super Tourist), Columbus also offered heavier duty tubing like SP so the builder tailored bikes intended for loaded touring.
I think this Nishiki is cool, well priced and very nice condition for what it is. it’s pretty rideable and with a few mods/updates it could still be put to actual touring duties (black paint is easy to match if you added a few more braze-on’s).
I wasn’t.
Just a throwaway point of difference.
I had one of those years ago in Canada, which is most likely where this once came from. They’re pretty nice actually, for what they are.
Up on bumtree at a more realistic price,
Fark … so not buying anything at the moment but this is ridonkulously good value. I really hope someone here picks this up.
Larfinboy will be riven with temptation. It’s his size.