Mid-90s Specialized Hardrock Gx


Here is a long overdue write-up for my upright urban cruiser. I found this bike on Kijiji in unbelievable condition. The bike was barely ridden and had all original components and even included a near-mint, plastic 'dork-disc' behind the cassette. Generally, these plastic discs loose their color, dry-out and become brittle. For this one to look brand new was a indication of the overall condition of the bike and I knew I had to pick it up.



I picked this bike up in winter 2022, and it sat around for a while until I eventually found the motivation to build it up. Sometimes you have a small component in which you center an entire build around. For this bike it was a set of Wald Gull-wing 898 bars. I wanted to try building something with a fairly comfortable, up-right and swept-back riding position. These bars are typically found beach cruisers and basket bike, but the trick I found was to angle the bars slightly down, versus up. Much nicer ride and look, aesthetically. Overall the bike is a super smooth ride and pretty happy with the final product. Even with a 110mm stem, I trimmed 10mm from each side to prevent my knees from knocking the bars. 


These days, vintage specialized resto-mods are a dime a dozen. The specialized Rockhopper being the fan favorite, but this Hardrock provides a pretty good platform for serial tinkerers like myself. My impressions is the Hardrock Gx is nothing really to write home about in terms of frame quality and specs. Aluminum frame and a Shimano LX groupset. However, the 135mm rear hub spacing can easily accommodate a 8/9/10 speed freehub and the 1 1/8" headtube allows for either a threaded or modern threadless fork and headset. When swapping out vintage forks its always important to keep your axle-to-crown length in mind, as older MTBs need a non-suspension corrected fork to maintain geometry or else they feel like a "drunken goat". 


Ultimately there is nothing to novel here and the bike came together well. Modern 1x drivetrain paired with a some kind of alt bar and the bike is ready for Youtube!

Two main takeaways for me on this one: don't skimp on your brake cable housing. Quality housing = quality braking. And, for square taper BB's, you need to match axle width to your crank of choice. I swapped out the original Specialized cranks for Shimano XT M730s (my crank of choice) and had to buy a wider BB to get everything to line up. Sheldon Brown has a great resource here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/bbsize.html

Always learning! Thanks for tuning in. 

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