Building my Sister her First Mountain Bike (and testing it)

Murder Machine needs a home now if you don't know what

bike

I'm talking about. Murder Machine was a black hardtail that was my main

bike

for a while and became the Murder Machine when we converted it to a single speed. and people were surprised that I took the gears off the thing and made some changes and actually turned it into a really cool and interesting bike and when we made that giant Beagle gear we used the Killer Machine because it was single speed and that's why It's been a great I've been a part of the channel for a while, but I have too many bikes similar to this one, so it's time to find this bike a real home and a real owner who's going to ride it, and the other day when my

sister

He asked me for one.

mountain

bike recommendation I said, well, I'll send you one.

I know my

sister

will use it because she is an avid cyclist, she went to work when she lived in New York City, now she is in California, you need a car there and she wants a bike for recreation, so this will be a special build. I want it to be cool, I want it to be personal, so before we dig in and figure out what parts we're going to put on this bike, let's paint it. We can give it time to heal. I'm not going to discuss something that painters have been doing for years. I don't know why you sand it wet, it just works, if you sand it dry it doesn't have the same effect, maybe someone can explain it. for me why wet sanding works like that so I'm going to try to prep as much as I can while the primer dries so I have three solid transmission options here.

I have an Eagle x01 which is new and then I have a Microshift advent clutch which of course is the cheapest. I want you to have a good experience. I don't want you to have to fix your bike all the time so I'll give you the Microshift because it's nine speed there are bigger gaps between the gears and in my

testing

it's been rock solid it's a really good shifting system and exactly for Same reason Shimano MT200 brakes are the cheapest hydraulic disc brakes you can get and they are also the most reliable, like you don't have to do anything to them.

It's crazy. It's a bit risky. I've never used this stuff before and I don't know if my sister will like it, so, uh, come on. get to work   You can lose so many parts on a bike built like this and taking care of it before you start

building

is a huge time saver, you don't want to drop what you're doing and drive around town looking for a bottom bracket so let's lay it all out okay we need two very important things

first

of all a dropper seat post that fits this bike here we go a 30.9 dropper post we just need a lever and finally our rear wheel has a body of XD freehub which is for For SRAM cassettes we use a Microshift transmission, so we need an HG freewheel body which is Shimano.

This might work to achieve this. Literally just pop it out, but it's a lot easier if it has a cassette attached, so I'll do that. Usually you screw on a cassette and pull it to try to get the old one out and then the new one out, you have to move it around making sure the pawls are compressed and use common sense, like a lot of things you can do on a bike. I just visually see how they go together so I cleaned all the old sealant off of these wheels and now I'm putting on lighter tires because they're lighter if she starts racing enduros on this bike or something we'll put heavier tires on it. but for now I think she'll appreciate that it's a little easier to pedal now that we can build a bike, so before we start going crazy, I want to put a chainstay protector on this bike because that's where the chain will be. tapping up and down, sometimes I forget to do this when I repaint a frame, most frames have some type of chainstay protector installed and I also want to find out what the accent color will be on this bike, my instinct It's going like a copper or blue or something, but I asked my daughter and she said purple.

I have to do better with this dropper post lever. These are... why did they do it like this? Okay, this Race Face lever looks much better and it looks like I have a clamp that will work with it. First of all, isn't it crazy how purple the bike looks from this angle and then when you look at it from the front? completely blue The second thing is that this brake hose is very long when you buy new brakes, the hoses come long because they are made to fit any bike, so we are going to disconnect the hose from the lever and we are going to find out what size we want and we'll cut it off, then we'll put new hydraulic fittings on the end, we'll install the hose back onto the lever and then we'll make sure the lever is full of fluid, no air bubbles, bleed the lever a little bit.

So now that everything is sorted, we need to ruin it with a dropper post cable. The dropper post cable goes under the bike and then back to the seat tube. Now, to secure the cable down here, I'm going to have to do a 3D. Print something: The bike originally came with these little clamps, so what I'm going to make are little M5 flange mounts. It's easier for me and whoever services it in the future. M5 comes in here and you can see it's recessed. the zip tie goes through here and you can see that the cable fits here in this little curved part.

This is exciting because we're almost done here, we just need to connect this dropper post cable, take care of some little finishing touches and then we can take a good look at it, let's see if I've achieved my goal of making this bike lightweight. 12.4 kilograms, 27 and a half pounds. There are lighter hardtail bikes on the market, but the turning weight is low and it's certainly not heavy. This was my bike at one point. It has a lot of history from this YouTube channel and therefore needs a proper beating before sending it, so I have no doubt that my sister is going to ride this bike, but like me, she tends to learn by doing. , so you should do it.

Try to include a little tutorial here to give you the basics. Congratulations on your new

mountain

bike. Most of it is self-explanatory, but it's a little different. First of all, you have changes. I'm sure you know how to operate them. you have to be pedaling the bike. This bike has some parts, like carbon handlebars, that if you tighten them too much you will break them. They are actually very strong to the point where you overtighten them with the seatpost collar. If you tighten the seat post too much The dropper post is not going to work, that's right, you have a dropper post.

There's a little lever here on the handlebar that works like an office chair. Push the lever down, apply weight and the seat will lower. When you want to return to the pedaling position, simply press the lever and it will go back up. Now your tires don't have inner tubes, they have sealant, which means you probably won't get a flat on this bike. but if you have to do a repair on the road, like tighten something or straighten the handlebars, you actually have tools built into the head tube, just pull this little thing that says "Uno" and there's really one.

The important thing is that if you have to put this bike down, don't do it on the drive side, which is the side with all the gears. You could adjust the derailleur hanger and then the derailleur will be disabled. That's all. The rest is self explanatory, you're going to learn just by mountain biking or being around other mountain bikers, have fun and show no mercy, so it was a test ride and although I didn't find anything. wrong with the bike there are two things that I will have to address

first

of all I have to do the best I can to adjust the fork to my sister's weight and riding style the other thing is that the dropper post does not have enough air pressure is so sometimes it won't go up and I have to help it so we pressure set it up, put it back on and then this is ready to ship so this bike essentially went from sitting around the storage unit waiting to be used as an experiment for a much more dignified existence and I can't think of a much better way to eliminate bikes from my fleet than to give them a farewell like this and since this was the first bike that was sent to me as a YouTuber for free.

It means a lot to me. It's one of the bikes that started all of this and I'm glad you could join me in fixing it up and giving it a new home. I hope you enjoyed it. This video I hope you learned something and if you didn't I hope you at least found it entertaining thanks for joining me today and see you next time