War Rig - 90s Univega Alpina S6.7
This is gonna be a long one.
I bought this 94 (I think) Univega Alpina frame one night years ago while looking through eBay for something to build that I could load up and head to Mexico on. No joke. I was living in a small town on the coast of Oregon and everything sucked. I was ready to leave, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. So why not hop on a bike and ride south?
Full disclosure, I was drinking that night and I usually get these kind of ideas while drinking.
I knew I wanted a steel 26er with a 9/8ths headtube, but that was about all I knew. While browsing I somehow landed on this purple-fade-to-grey Univega with their super rad dropped Max Mudroom chainstays and I knew it was the one. Double butted Japanese steel with relatively massive tire clearance for a 90s mountain bike, these frames are sorely slept on. It was covered in bumper stickers and had a buy it now price of $90 but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. Plus, as I said, I had been drinking.
The eBay ad said there were no dents in the frame, however once it showed up and I had started removing the bumper stickers I found a good sized dent on the down tube and a smaller one in the top tube. It didn’t really bother me, I knew they were only cosmetic, but I emailed the seller hoping for bit of a rebate (sober me knew I overpaid on this thing) and he refunded me the full cost of the frame and told me I could keep it. Hell yeah!
The first version of this bike was pretty goofy. I didn’t really know what I was trying to go for. Drop bar vintage mountain bikes were trendy at the time, so I figured I’d get some flared dirt drops. As you probably know, 90s mountain bikes have long top tubes for their stack height. To make everything work, I ended up with a real tall stack, mostly thanks to a Velo Orange Cigne stem. Which I hate. Sorry if you’re a fan, I just can’t hang with that stem aesthetically. That said, I did enjoy this version of the bike and put hundreds of miles on it.
It was a pretty solid build, however you feel about the VO stem. Surly Troll fork, red Race Face forged cranks*, Avid Arch Rivals front and rear, Deore XT set up as 10 speed with an old bar end shifter that I had to modify to have more throw. Selle Anatomica saddle, Thomson seat post. It was a GoodBike for sure!
*The cranks being red come into play later in this story.
After trying for a year and a half and however many miles, I just couldn’t make the dirt drops work for me. I never used the drops except for a few times where I forced myself to use them and I hated it, I was mostly on the flats or in the hoods. The hoods weren’t comfortable, so I decided to try a flat bar with some sweep.
This version was fun, I also put on a Hite-Rite spring since this frame uses a 26.8 seat post, a weird size that telescoping droppers don’t exist for, but it was such a pain to use that I rarely did.
I had moved to Santa Fe, NM by this point and was having a blast riding the different trails and ripping around La Tierra with some buddies. I had preordered the original 4130 Tumbleweed Persuader handle bar and when it eventually showed up I threw that on, as well as a front rack, and this was pretty much the final build of this version.
Up until it was stolen.
So yeah, my Univega was stolen. I had it parked on the communal “secure” bike rack at my apartment and it managed to wonder off with 3 other bikes. It was usually locked on that rack with my big ass Kryptonite Fahgettaboudit lock, but I had borrowed the lock for my motorcycle thinking the bike would be fine since it was behind a locked door. Nope.
I was pretty bummed and kicking myself pretty hard. I had intended to go get another chain lock to keep on the bike rack but never got around to it. That was my bad.
A few months go by and I was driving somewhere one day and then I notice this dude riding down the street on a bike with red cranks. I didn’t even need to take a double take, I knew it was my bike. The red cranks were easy to spot from a block and a half away. I had to do some sketchy driving to catch up to him as he was going a completely different direction than I was heading, but I was able to head him off.
I rolled up next to the guy, yelled at him to pull over, and once we were off the road I confronted him. I told him he was on my bike, he said he got it from a friend, I told him I didn’t care where he got it, it’s mine and I’m taking it with me. After some back and forth he finally gave up and threw the bike at me. I packed it into the back of my XJ as he stormed off.
Once I got it home, I assessed everything. It was pretty rough. He had gone at all the decals with a knife or something and the rad purple-fade-to-grey paint was trashed.
I let the bike sit around for close to a year. I was bummed it got so messed up during the few months it lived on the streets and I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it anymore.
Around this time
, and others from the GoodBikes cabal, were going on about Dangerbird 2024 and working on a big meetup of online bike pals to participate in the ride. That’s when gears shifted a little for the Univega.I decided that, with the paint fucked, I was gonna strip it to bare metal and add a brake tab and brake hose routing. It was something I had always kinda planned on doing, but I had finally gotten my hands on a brazing rig and it was time. Main reason being it’s pretty hard to find tubeless 26er rim brake rims, and Ben was adamant that you really should be on tubeless for Dangerbird.
So I brazed on a disc tab, which came out ok considering it was my first time in years doing any brazing, and built up some tubeless wheels using white Stan’s ZTR rims that I splatter painted, a Stan’s hub in the rear, and some generic front hub. With the wheels done, I threw on some 2.4 Maxxis High Roller IIs.
I built the bike up with Race Face Atlas cranks using the same XT 11 speed rear mech, the matching 11 speed shifter, and a cheap oil slick 11 speed cassette. I threw on a beat up green Turbo saddle, and raided the parts bins for the rest.
The bike was pretty awkward at this stage. A lot of the parts were from the bin and didn’t really work very well. The stem was too low and the wide, sweepy Albatross bars I had thrown on were too low and the reach was too long. Unfortunately, I had cut the steer tube on the Surly fork to work with the VO stem, which left it too short to run as high of a stack as I was needing for this low stack frame.
While I was trying to come up with solutions to that mess, I came across a new old stock 90s Power Post on eBay that would fit this frame. It uses a 26.8 sized post and while I had a nice Thompson post for it, I really wanted some kind of dropper. There was no way I was gonna pass this wacky thing up.
People often mistake it for a suspension post but it’s a proper dropper! Handlebar remote and all. Rather than lowering the seat using telescoping office chair technology that modern droppers use, it’s a parallelogram design that drops the seat down over the top tube to get it out of the way. Like so-
Wild, right? It also has two other positions, a laid back and even further laid back, neither of which I found very useful. Still neat though.
The bike more or less was coming together, I just needed to figure out the cockpit. Dangerbird was coming up quick and I needed a solution, so I had Marino in Peru make me a new fork. New fork meant uncut steerer!
I have a minivelo that Marino built for me and I love it (working on a future article for that bike too! It won’t be as long as this one though, I promise), so it seemed like as good idea as any to have him make me a fork for the Univega. I spec’d it to be similar to the Troll fork, not as many “warts” but more than enough. Post mount as well as rim brake ready. The big difference being that the Marino fork is through axle instead of QR. And it’s segmented for steeze. I also had them do a fun yellow-to-orange fade with pink branding.
I had to order some TA endcaps for the generic hub I built the front wheel with, but they were readably available on Ali Express so no big deal. Finally I had enough stack height to figure out my cockpit situation. Which ended up being a bunch of spacers, a stubby UNO stem and the Tumbleweed bars I had been running before.
Quite a spacer stack. I had also thought about either making my own riser bars or picking up some Stridsland Bullship bars once they were out. Those bars were made with the whole long-reach-short-stack of 90s mountain bikes in mind and probably would have been perfect on this thing.
This setup was good for now though, it got the bars up where I needed them and the bike was super comfy to ride. The Power Post is meant to be ridden in it’s first laid back setting, as seen below, with the upright position meant for climbing, so I tried using it like that for a while, which in the end I think was the cause of me hurting my knee at Dangerbird. More on that later.
So the bike was more or less sorted, but I needed to figure out my Dangerbird loadout - where was I going to mount all my gear and a minimum of 5 liters of water?
Also, side note, at this point a buddy of mine told me I needed to name my bike or else I was never going to mesh with it. Silly superstition, but why not? I named my other bikes, why not the Univega? So I had started referring to it as the War Rig (I dig the Mad Max cinematic universe, ok?), mostly due to the stripped steel frame that I was sure would eventually start to collect surface rust.
Also, before any other Mad Max nerds chime in, I’m aware that the War Rig from the movie was actually black but whatever ok?
Anyhow, I needed a frame bag. Somehow I ended up on LesenokBag’s Etsy page. If you’re needing a custom made bag, or a set of bags, I highly recommend LeseonkBag. It’s a woman owned bag company based out of Ukraine making custom bags at ridiculously low prices. I had around a month before Dangerbird and was worried there wouldn’t be time to have a bag made, but she was able to get a bag based off the measurements I gave her to my door in around two weeks. And it’s a sick bag at that.
I bought myself some camping gear and needed to work out how to put it on the bike. I decided my best bet was to build a rack for the rear of the bike to hold the tent and a couple extra water bottles. Two bottles on the rack, one under the down tube, and two on the fork got me to 5 liters of water.
I didn’t have a tubing bender at the time, so to make the rack I cut a bunch of slits in the tubing and bent it into the shape I wanted and brazed it into one piece. This was all very rushed, no measurements taken, all done by eye with no fixtures, so the end result is pretty ugly and not exactly straight, but it worked great. Very minimalist.
I also added two extra bosses to the side of the seat tube to mount a pump. While not the best pump for a large-volume-low-pressure-tire bike, I had a Road Morph G pump kicking around and it worked well enough.
I was mostly there, but I knew I still needed a bar bag and some feed bags. I got some “tactical” ammo pouches, two for $10 on eBay, to use as stem bags and they worked really well. As for the bar bag, I borrowed a Swift Industries Zeitgeist from Andrew, another member of the cabal, once I got to Las Cruses for the Dangerbird weekend.
All loaded out, the War Rig was awesome. It handled the weight well, though a little noodley, and was a pleasure to ride. Well, until near the end of day 2 of our three day adventure anyway, when my knee had enough.
This isn’t meant to be a write up of how Dangerbird went, and it’s already super long in the tooth, but I’ll say this bike was just about everything I could ask for in a bike camping rig. It climbed like a goat, was super stable, I could endo pivot it even with all the weight.
I ended up messing my knee up while bombing a section of rolling tarmac hills on day two. I had the seat post in the full back position and was full tuck and in my 11th gear just cranking away when my knee let me know it was there with a sharp pain. I ended up DNFing Dangerbird due to my knee but, again, this isn’t about Dangerbird.
After I got home from Dangerbird, I put the bike away. I pulled it out two more times in the months since and each time I took it for a ride, my knee started complaining again. I’m sure this is something I could fix with working on my fit, but with all the bikes and bike projects I have, the War Rig wasn’t getting the attention it deserves. I got it in my head that I wanted to replace it and a couple other bikes with a quiver killer of sorts and bought a Kona Unit X, so it was time to pass on the Univega.
The frame, fork, Power Post, ugly rack, and frame bag are all headed to a rad guy up in Denver who seems really excited to build it and continue its story. The wheels and most of the drivetrain are going on my partner’s step through Hard Rock project. The rest of the bits are returning to the bins for now.
I’m sad to see it go, it was a years long ordeal trying to make this bike work for me in the way I wanted, but in the end I’m happy it’s going to someone else who will love it.
I know this was a long one, kudos if you made it to the end. As mentioned, I have many bikes and many projects, many of which I hope to write about here on GoodBikes.
There’s the Marino minivelo I brought up earlier, and my partner’s Hard Rock - that’s gonna be a rad one. She and I also have a Cannondale tandem we’re building, and there’s the klunker, the polo bike, and the Unit should be here soon. Each of them GoodBikes. None of these other bikes have the history that the Univega and I had though, so I don’t think I’ll have nearly as much to say about them.
At any rate, thanks for reading!
This is a good bike
This is a very good bike