Written on August 13th, 2024 By Summer Hanson
This was my first full rebuild. This bike was really trashed when we got it, which can be hard to tell by a single photo on a Facebook Marketplace listing, but by way of needing to be completely taken apart and every part on it replaced or restored, it taught me a whole lot!
^Before: here's the original listing photo on Facebook Marketplace, where it was listed for $40, which, given the state of the bike, wasn't that great of a deal.
The frame caught my eye for my friend and neighbor Alex, who I wanted to build a bike for, because when she first moved to Seattle, we went on a fall girls' trip to a cabin in Skykomish, WA. It was a sweet bonding experience early in our friendship and I wanted to commemorate it by bringing this unique vintage bike back to life for her!
^After: Here's the final build for Alex! It took me countless hours but I learned a lot!
We collected it from a fellow Crown Hill resident on a cloudy day in a QFC parking lot where she made sure it was a good size for her. My friend Carlos joined us and snagged a Trek from the same guy while we were at it!
^Alex with her new bike the day we got it. The chain was so tangled and rusted that we couldn't even roll the back wheel... but we could tell it had good bones!
Skykomish bikes were sold by Costco in the early 1990's, a blip in time when they were selling some pretty sweet steel rigid MTBs that make for sweet xbikes or all terrain bikes to bop around with today. As a 90's PNW kid myself, there's also a certain sentimentality to the history of Skykomish bikes.
The Marble Point was their higher end model at the time, and when I brought it into the shop, despite its disastrous state, Ed and Justin each looked at it and went "that's a sweet bike," and shortly after, Justin added another Marble Point to our collection (which I later customized for my friend Cat, who was also on our Skykomish Girls' trip... more on that one later!)
To keep the build affordable and sustainable, I stuck to mostly used parts from our bins of take-off components from other bikes. This bike was really a labor of love, and is a testament to how if you take the time, you can bring a bike back to life using what's just laying around. It's not the easiest or the cheapest way to get a bike, but it's probably the coolest and most eco-friendly, if you ask me.
^Me (Summer) working on the bike at the shop in the early stages.
We iterated on the riding position a fair amount, with Alex being tall but wanting an upright riding position and forgiving standover height, so we went with some tall riser bars we had at the shop.
Alex chose a classic Wald 137 front basket (in black to match the bars), with integrated hardware for a breezy look, since she will mostly use the bike for little bop-around-town daytime adventures.
We had some 26" Vee Tires that a customer brought us, and Alex and I were both fans of this unique tread:
Refreshed canti brakes, and used Shimano drivetrain parts. I think I was able to rescue the original crankset, phew! We stuck with the original 3x7; it was already geared pretty well for Seattle hills.
New sunlite MTB levers, some cool lookin' used grips, and easy indexed shifting in the rear.
I went with a friction shifter for the front, a satisfying and aesthetically well-matched affordable little thumbie from Sunrace:
A used Specialized bottle cage as a nod to Alex's first bike (a Specialized Rockhopper), and I couldn't help but throw on this used Bell saddle bag because the red logo matched so nicely!
A cushy new Selle Royale Ellipse seat that Alex picked out was the final touch after a couple test rides:
Now I'm one step closer to getting all my friends to ride around on bikes with me :)
Thanks for lookin!
-Summer