Bikes Of 2020: 2003 Karate Monkey

 It's THAT time of year again when I have my year-end reviews. This series will cover my bikes I used during 2020, any changes made, and why I still like each one- or don't! Thanks for reading!

This bike has been around about the longest of anything I have here in the stable. Hmm.......I have owned bikes previous to the Karate Monkey. Pretty sure they are gone. With the outside exception of my original touring bike which is in the Lab as a rolling chassis.  And that bike hasn't been ridden in decades. Maybe I should get that up and running again......anyway....

The Karate Monkey was announced at the 2002 Interbike show about the time I got back into the bicycle business again. I had just left my job as a car mechanic and was working as a bicycle mechanic once again. This meant that I could finally pursue my dream of a few years running to own an actual 29" wheeled mountain bike. Of course, I'd been hanging on every word on the internet concerning them and after many hours of careful consideration, I knew this thing was for me. I sold a perfectly good 1996 highly customized Bontrager Race 26"er from the Santa Cruz shop to buy this new fangled wagon wheeled rig. Well, actually, I had to build the entire thing from scratch. Karate Monkey's were frame/forks to start with. 

I won't bore y'all with the entire history of this bike of mine. I will only say that this bike spent many years in mothballs, mostly due to a stuck UN55 cartridge bottom bracket. I finally freed that unit from the rusty grip of corrosion quite some time ago now and got the bike up and running again. Karate Monkeys, at least the early ones, were one of those 'jack-of-all-trades' 29"ers, as many early ones were. You could go geared, single speed, disc brakes, or cantilever brakes. I set it up single speed and disc to begin with and have only switched it out to rim brakes recently. 

I had a goofy Velo Orange stem on this bike for a bit and I have determined it just sat me up too high, so I removed it. That happened early this Summer, and since then this bike has been a great rig to bomb around on when I need a quick spin. Future plans are to build a new set of wheels for it using some Surly Jim Brown hubs I have and return the bike to a disc brake set up since those hubs are disc compatible. These will be bolted on and then I may be looking for a few bags to deck this out with, new tires, and I think it may return as a bike I use more often. 

This bike holds the distinction of being the bike I rode the furthest in one sitting going an estimated 160+ miles in a day. I don't have an exact mileage since it was a kind of an afterthought to record the mileage on the spot the day I did that. That would have been the very first Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational. It's the first 'gravel bike' I ever used for that purpose. So, this bike has been kind of special to me ever since.