The wheels were the toughest to find as I am cheap and decent disc brake wheels don’t often show up at Bikeworks North, where I get most of my parts. The only part that I had to buy new was the seatpost. I found parts at Bikeworks, on Kijjijj, and at the MEC gear swap. Over the course of the summer and early fall I kept an eye out for components and accumulated them. The first step in rebuilding it was acquiring the parts needed, not being the sort of components that I already had in my little stockpile. As I usually have a number of bike projects in the works, I didn’t rush this one. The frame is quite stout and looked like it could take a lot of abuse, more than I’d likely ever dish out. It seemed like as good a bike as my very mediocre skills warranted. You can see the original parts spec here and read a BikeRadar review here. Not a high-end bike, but not a department store piece of junk, either. I did a little internet sleuthing and found that the Sachem 3.0 had been Iron Horse’s entry level all-mountain bike (something between a cross-country and a down hill bike) and likely retailed for more than a $1000. However, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to get it back in working order, and a decent mountain bike was one thing I didn’t yet have in my little fleet. At first I considered stripping it for parts as there were some decent components left on it. Or if it had been, enough time had passed that the record was no longer on file. When I got home I checked to see if it had been reported stolen. Here I am carrying the bike home from the ravine,enjoying the irony of transporting a 2007 mountain bike with a 3-speed forty-two years its senior. This one however seemed to show some promise. In the past I’ve found the remains of stolen bikes before and they have always been low-end pieces of junk.
It had been stripped of the wheels, front derailleur and shifter, and front brake lever and caliper.
IRON HORSE BIKE SALE FREE
It had been abandoned for some time and I had to tear it free of the vegetation that grown around it. I discovered the Sachem when I was volunteering at a ravine clean-up. I refer to this bike as my Ravine Bike not because I ride it in the ravines (although I do) but because that’s where I found it: in Kennedale Ravine. Still, I didn’t let that stop me from rehabilitating the Iron Horse bike I salvaged more than a year ago. That is to say, though as an unhelmeted child I would ride my banana bike down the 45 degree slope of our local gravel pit and while as a teen I road my Supercycle 12-speed around the rocky, cliff-side paths of my coastal Newfoundland home and as a young adult I pedaled my rigid framed MTB through my Dad’s rough and ready wood cutting tracks – I have very little knowledge of contemporary mountain bikes and the specialized technology developed for this type of riding. What I know about mountain biking you could fit in a child sized CamelBak and still have room to spare for a week’s worth of back country bikepacking supplies.