Also posted this on r/vintagebicycles
This is the story of a 1987 Ross Mt Hood sold to someone (I'm actually not sure whom) at Pullens Ordinary Bicycles in Rome, GA. I know this from the original stickers that are somehow still on the bike after all these years. Somehow this bicycle made its way from Rome to Dayton, Ohio, where my grandfather picked it up used for my mother sometime around late high school or college. This part of the story is a little fuzzy since I've been trying to pry as many details as I can out of my mom. At some point she stopped riding it and threw it in storage.
When I got to high school, I was about 12, and I inherited this bike from my mom. It was a bit tall for me but I was a very tall 12-year-old and grew into it pretty quickly. The bike had been serviced at least once or twice before I got it, though I had no idea at the time. After doing tons of research on it I figured out that when I got it, it had pretty much all original parts except for the rear hub. My mom had let it sit for a while and some of the original cable sheathing had broken and the cables had turned into a rat's nest. We took it to a shop and they somehow ended up only replacing the cables that weren't broken, so I ended up learning to do them myself. This was my first foray into wrenching on things. I got a new chain, brakes, and cables, just the basics, and I like to think that's what sparked my love of fixing mechanical things. I rode it a good amount to get to and from school, started riding it less once I started driving, and stopped altogether when someone stole the seat.
I went to Maryland for college and didn't bring the bike with me, riding a motorcycle around everywhere instead. Once I graduated and stayed in Maryland I brought it back on a visit home. I got a new seat and reworked all the basics again but didn't really ride it that much. Where I lived had pretty bad biking infrastructure and I was basically boxed into using my car. It was also during COVID so there weren't really any destinations to bike to anyway. I eventually moved to the San Joaquin Valley in California where I got super busy with work and was traveling a ton. The bike sat in storage for about a year before I moved to Seattle.
After about a year there I started using it for recreational rides, only light trails at most, and eventually started commuting on it too. By this point it had been at least 10 years, probably more, since anyone had looked it over. That's when I found out my mother had never serviced it either, so really it had probably been 40 years since its last service. Granted it had never seen any proper mountain bike use, let alone heavy riding, and I'd kept it in at least semi-climate-controlled storage the whole time, so the condition wasn't really too bad.
That's when the real repair work started. When I went to service the hubs, the rear hub turned out to actually be in decent shape, totally serviceable and no need to replace the cones. The front hub was another story. The cones were destroyed and the threads on the ends of the axle were all beat up from where the fork dropouts ride on them, making it really hard to thread anything on. Whoever serviced it last had also used oversized washers, which matters here because the spacer nuts are the captive washer type. The washers had deformed and cold welded to the nuts and that took a long ass time to sort out. To top it off it's a 9x26tpi axle, so every time I asked a shop if they had any, the first question I got was "are you servicing a kids bike?" I have to shout out Recycled Cycle in Seattle for being the only shop in the whole city that actually keeps a stock of 9mm and 9.5mm cones for 3/16 bearings. For the first time in possibly 30 to 40 years the hubs have been properly serviced.
Next up is the bottom bracket. There's only the slightest hint of play in it so I'm going to hold off a little longer, but it's getting a cartridge BB when the time comes.
by TheHerosShade