Jimmy's Jam

Jimmy’s Jam

Jam on!

The Story

I have a good friend Jimmy who used to be my neighbor. Jimmy is about as varied an athlete as you might come across, with passions for skiing, rock climbing, kayaking, whisky drinking, parasailing, and of course, mountain biking! He’s also just a helluva good guy.

Due to some changing life circumstances he moved away and needed to downsize some of his stuff. This is how I came to be the caretaker of his previous XC race bike from the ‘90’s, which is the subject of today’s resto-mod. One of Jimmy’s favorite bands is Pearl Jam, so the name for this project came up with itself.

Design Goals

There were a couple of ideas floating around for this bike, but what I settled on was actually a question. How good do we have it with today’s modern bike geometry? (Spoiler alert: we have it very good.) I sought to do this by taking a frame that is nigh on 30 years old, and slapping as many modern parts on it as possible/reasonable. The thought was that by putting modern high-ish performance parts on the bike, we could “control” for the components and focus on the ride characteristics and feel of a frame design that was once pioneering, but is now about three decades out of fashion.

I thought about painting this bike, but I really like the original raw carbon and red decal combination and decided to let it ride!

The Donor

By the time this 1996 Trek 9800 SHX made its way into my little chop shop, it had a long, illustrious career on the trails and in races. And it showed. There are scrapes and scuffs from bar spins, crashes, big airs, and a little bit of chain suck. However, the matte clear coat over the raw carbon looks way better than the yellowed, flaky cancer that most other carbon bikes of this vintage suffer from. This bike was clearly well taken care of mechanically, but was owned with my favorite “tools not jewels” philosophy.

The bike was certainly a mix of stock and aftermarket parts. From what I can tell, the brakes, wheels, SID fork, part of the cockpit, and a couple of drivetrain components were all upgraded from their stock forms. Makes perfect sense to upgrade them a little further!

The Problems

The biggest problem on this bike was the rear hub. In the stand, the hub would engage just fine. However, under actual load with a human on the bike, it would skip every single engagement point with a sound like someone had tossed a bunch of nuts and bolts in a running blender.

At some point in this bike’s life, the stock rear wheel was replaced with a Mavic hoop that had a Coda 900 hub.

Coda was Cannondale’s in-house component brand at the time. I kind of figured that the hub used the same Shimano body that seemingly every rear hub did for years and years. But no dice. Turns out that Cannondale used DT Hugi (later DT Swiss) as the OEM for this hub, and this is how I learned that this 30 year old hub has the same star-ratchet technology found in a huge host of modern hubs.

After digging up an old manual I was able to pull the hub apart and find that the edges of the ratchet teeth were rounded, and the grease was completely solidified. I happened to have a pair of 18 tooth ratchet rings from an upgrade that I did on one of my mountain bikes with wheels I bought in 2023. The parts looked the same as the very old ones I had removed from the bum hub, but I thought there was no way that the design hadn’t changed in three decades. But the ratchet rings from a modern wheelset dropped right into a hub from the mid 90’s. I call that a win! The hub spins and sounds great now. I wish all rebuilds were that easy!

The Outcome

The bike turned out pretty awesome. With the exception of the rear hub rebuild, all of the other parts were plug and play straight from my parts bin. As a bonus, I had a bunch of red parts on hand that go really well with the factory decals, even down to the disc rotor bolts. Without the customary multi-week paint process, this bike was able to go together over a couple of beers.

That said, this bike definitely accomplished what I set out for it to do, which is to make me appreciate just how far mountain bikes have come since this one was set to trail. Even with a modern 1x11 XT drivetrain, the riding experience was drastically overshadowed by the geometry of yesteryear. The cockpit was cramped, the steering was extremely twitchy, it wanted to wheelie on every single pedal stroke during a technical section of a climb, and it hated going fast. For lack of a better word, the bike felt nervous. And it made me nervous. And slow. On my modern hardtail, I can do one of my “lunch laps” in about 40 minutes. It took almost an hour on this bike.

All my griping aside, this bike is fun to ride! I find that the adage “it’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow” carries straight over to mountain bikes. With my modern full suspension, or even to some degree my hardtail bikes, I can point them at a line, blast through it, and come out on the other side without much thought. But on this vintage Trek, technical features that wouldn’t get a second glance from a 29” wheel pose as puzzles that need to be solved by the rider in real time.

After just a couple of rides, I was given an immense appreciation for how good mountain bikes are these days. It also gave me an instant understanding of why Jimmy, the 9800’s original pilot, is such a damn good rider. If he was able to clock podiums while catching huge airs beside saguaro cacti in desert XC races, he must feel invincible when swinging a leg over a modern high end full suspension trail bike. It made me understand that my modern bikes have allowed me to go faster and jump higher, but they have also made me a lazier and more complacent rider. I’m sure that there’s a balance in there somewhere, but it will take some more seat time on this Trek to figure it out.

There may be some future improvements coming to this bike in the form of a dropper post, slightly bigger tires, and maybe a wider handlebar. We’ll see, but for now I am more than happy with how this blast from the past turned out. Thank you, Jimmy!