hi i'm paul brodie back in the shop welcome mitch behind the camera
viewers have been noticing that there's a bicycle up on the shelf here it's not there anymore
because it's down over here but they wanted to know about that bicycle that bicycle is the 69er
so i'm going to tell you a little bit of the background how that came to be i bought this
property in 1997 and it was a foreclosure from the bank the bank had seized it off the women who
lived here and it was very run down and basically it was land value there were buildings on it but
they were of no real value at all so where we are right now that's where the barn was and you can
see the barn and you can see amber my dog running on the right and i had to build a shop out of that
so i hired a crew of four people they were called best by far they were not best by far but that's
not the story and so about six weeks later you can see what they had built obviously that took care
of the shop now i had to work on the house and i i knew i couldn't do that myself i knew i knew i
needed some help so i had to have a friend we're still friends that's richard parker and uh he
works in the in the construction business and the company he worked for works for heather bray they
specialize in leaky condos fixing leaky condo so he was the guy to come in and rip and tear he was
very good at that he wanted a mountain bike he wanted a downhill mountain bike so
he had seen a magazine and there was a bike in there and it had a shimano nexus hub up above
the bottom bracket and he wanted something like that he asked me if i would build it for him so
we came up with a with an arrangement that we would swap hour for hour it's it was a barter
and so he ended up doing a hundred hours on my house and i ended up doing a hundred hours on
the 69ers so that's basically how this project all came together my shop became operational in
the fall of 97 and so it was time for me to start using this new shop and so basically my first big
project was this bike so i got my cardboard i got my masking tape i got my sharpies
and i designed i set up and i designed it to have seven inches of of travel on the back
with a rising rate linkage and a fox shock ultimately this became frame number 4213
i'd been in the bicycle industry for quite a while so that was the next sequence of the number
in the photo you can see all the parts laid out this this would be the spring of 1998 and then in
the next photo that's the bike assembled that was the spring of 98 and that's when richard he took
possession of the bike that was a good thing he now had his bike and i had fulfilled my part of
the bottom why is the bike called the 69er it's to do with the head tube angle the head tube angle is
69 degrees on the bicycle world you always measure up from the horizontal back in 1997
69 degrees was pretty slack so that's all changed now i understand that downhill bikes sometimes go
to 64 degrees the world has definitely changed as i mentioned earlier i'm the fourth owner of
this bike so richard had it for about a year and he he raced it and then he decided that he wanted
something lighter so he had a friend whose name was patrick and and patrick works at a bike shop
he used to tune up the 69er he expressed interest into it in the bike so they did a swap xtr parts
for the bike and now and now and now patrick was the new owner of the bike so he raced it
for a year this is its second season and at the end of that year it started to get cracks
it got cracks i think here and so we added on a on a gusset here it didn't always have the gusset
and there was a few other cracks happening so richard came to me and he said you know
patrick's a really good guy and he works at a bike shop and he doesn't make much money and i
knew exactly where this was going so i said okay i'll weld it up but he pays for the heat treating
so that's what happened the bike got welded up and then and then uh patrick raced it for the second
season and then i heard that it was getting some cracks and all that so i made the assumption and
there it is again i i made an assumption that the bike was at the end of its lifespan and that it
was hanging up on a wall above a mantelpiece no one ever mentioned anything like that i just made
the assumption anyway i was wrong because i found out later that that's not what happened at all
i didn't hear anything about the bike for about 18 years
and then in 2017 i kept thinking about it i couldn't get the bike off my mind
i decided that i was gonna go and find the bike so i got patrick's phone number and i phoned for like
six months and left a message and nobody ever phoned me back so i kind of left it for a while
and then a couple years passed and i decided this is in 2019 now i decided i gotta find
that bike and this other friend of mine steve mitchell he's a collector i knew that he was
looking for the bike as well so it became a race to find the bike that's what i thought so
i found out that i could contact patrick through uh facebook and i found him on the sunshine coast
working at a bike shop phoned him up and i found out that he didn't own the bike anymore it was
chris's bike now they were friends they both worked at that other bike shop and chris had
always wanted the bike and when patrick stopped racing it that's when the pressure really amped
up so they made a deal patrick he told chris that you can ride the bike but if you break it you got
to buy it so the first thing that chris did was he took the bike up to whistler whistler is a
big mountain basically in our backyard and it's got lots of downhill and there's one line i think
it comes down under the chair if it's called the a-line that's what the experts ride it's full of
jumps rocks it's fast and all that at the bottom i think maybe you can see it from the pub i guess
that's the longhorn there's a thing called it's an it's an optional eight foot eight foot cliff drop
and you can ride around it no problem but if you go over it you're dropping down eight feet
so he did it once he did it twice and on the third time he did it the linkage exploded so he'd broken
the bike so he had to buy it off of patrick which is what he wanted to do all along anyway
so it became his bike and he tried to contact me but the person or the company my the old
oldest a distributor of brody bikes they weren't passing on the message so i never got the message
so in vancouver he found a fab shop and they did all the welding and they made pots for him and he
redesigned the linkage so he was raising it for an another couple of years i had no idea this
was going on i thought the bike was hung up on a mantelpiece so one of the things that happened was
that he he had to get this piece worked on this is the upper swing arm and he took it to the shop
and somehow it got left at the shop for not one month two months five years
and in the course of the five years the shop had a fire and of course this piece was gone
so he wasn't riding the bike i still didn't know chris at this point so i became like a private eye
and i i heard through the bike shop that he had worked at a auto wrecker in surrey so one saturday
morning i got my got on the internet and there was a whole list of them and i started phoning i went
down the list hello is chris there why do you want to see chris well he's got a bike i want to buy no
he's not here so finally i talked to someone they said yep yep chris works here so i left a message
never got phone back so i went there in my van and i walked in i said is chris here oh no he doesn't
work here he works over there so i went over there and phoned him up and he didn't live far away so
i went to his house we stood in the driveway and we we talked to after two solid hours
we talked about bikes the 69er racing and every half an hour he'd go into his shed and he'd
he'd bring out another part of the 69er so at the end of two hours there was a pile of parts
it was pretty sad but i got a bunch of stuff that i could work with so
i became the fourth owner and i went there i did not expect to meet chris didn't take any money
but he let me take all these parts anyway and he told me that he needed a shock he needed some
tires and some other parts so we basically did a trade that's how i got the 69er now that i had the
bike in my shop i had to start finding parts so i went on ebay and the rims came from norway the
shark the fork shark it came out of out of finland and the one part that i couldn't find is the
rotor on the back it's a hope rotor because these these brakes are early hope which is from england
and so you're gonna see a photo mitch pops up on the screen i'm looking for a 155
millimeter hope rotor if you have one i would love to talk to you i also want to thank the forks from
my friends steve mitchell he's the one who was also looking for the 69er he's a great guy and
i think what we'll do now is to look at the bike and just see how this mechanism works
okay at the heart of this is a shimano nexus hub here it's a seven speed this this hub if
you can see it from this is the hub from here to here it usually goes in the back wheel of a city
bike or something like that it's kind of heavy but it's also pretty neat unit can you see there's a
bearing here can you see from here to here there's a bearing so that bearing is four inch od three
and a half inch id and it's a quarter inch wide so it's a very hard to find bearing and back in those
days i paid over 200 for it i priced it yesterday 460 dollars for one bearing so how this works
is the power goes up the right side to the nexus hub it transfers through and the power comes
down the left side to the rear wheel so can you see what's happening here
we've got a chain tensioner here and if i freewheel backwards it's got the freewheel
inside the nexus hub so the rear sprocket on the back wheel is fixed there is no freewheel
on the back wheel so if i turn the wheel can you see that can you see what's going on there
so that's how the system works and why this would work well on a downhill bike is is
there's no derailleur which might might catch on a rock a derailleur always has
allows the jade at the chain to have some play and in the wrong situation off falls the chain
this here can you see there's almost no no play at all there's a little bit of play but it doesn't
matter where you go it's always the same amount of play because this is a constant between this
sprocket and this sprocket here so that's how the system works and you've also seen the video
how the linkage works that's how i got introduced to mitch actually because i wanted a video and i
asked him if he would shoot that video that's the first video that he shot in this shop these forks
are rst they're i don't know how much how much travel they got they're upside down forks and uh
that's what the bike was made with richard wanted to hope hope disc brakes front and rear so
this is basically original hope back from the late 90s you don't hope has changed now
this is single piston now that dual piston and the road is a lighter and all that so he had a
hope hub on the front the hope hub was gone so i made this hub i styled it off the rear hub
which my friend dan made for me because i guess i was out of town out of time and he was working at
a machine shop so thank you dan for the rehab this is carbon fiber 60 60 aluminum flanges
that was a little little bit of a trick to get the brake boss here and the flange is
happening at the same time but that all worked out yeah there was a lot of work to do you can
see here all the dents here that's from crashing and things like that when i talked to chris he he
told me that one day he was on his way up to a a race i think it was uh it was maple ridge and
and the 69 was on the back of his car and he was doing 40 miles an hour and the bike fell
off and there was the bike sliding down the road and no cars hit it so he picked up the
bike he put it on the back of the bike rack went to the race raced the bike came home so
this bike has been through a lot it's uh it's been raced for at least five seasons
and somehow it survived all that and getting welded up and
taken out again so i'm very happy to have it in my shop it's nice that it's all restored people
say well why don't you ride it well i did a bunch of welding on it to fix it up because some of the
welds weren't looking so good so i ground them out it's not heat treated and if i take this off-road
it's going to get all dirty so no it's a it's good just like it is we hope you've enjoyed this
segment of the 69er mitch and i like coffees that'd be great if you buy some coffee if you
like this and subscribe that's great for us too thank you very much see you next time stay safe
you