Gary Fisher Modernization
Charlie came to us with an old 26” CroMo Fisher that he wanted brought into the modern world. After a long conversation about potentially just building him a custom bike, he explained that he wanted to do it this way for several reasons. First, he wanted a bike with a story like none other. Secondly, his first mountain bike ever was a Gary Fisher and he had sentimental feelings about continuing his journey on a vintage Fisher of a similar era to the one he started on. Thirdly, why not?
He knew he wanted it to become a 29er (which is fitting since Gary Fisher himself was the man who eventually pushed that narrative on the industry), he wanted routing for a dropper post, and he wanted internal routing through the top tube for the rear brake line. Oh yeah… he wanted disc brakes and a modern 12 speed drivetrain. This was going to be a large undertaking to make all of these changes, but we agreed to follow the process and he agreed to the price.
We kept the original frame and made the modifications necessary for all of the line routing. The easiest way to accomplish the other mods was to cut the dropouts out of the bike and replace them with a modern slider from Paragon, and put a new production fork on it that was already built with all the accoutrements that he wanted. Turning the bike into a 29er was going to raise the bottom bracket a whole heck of a lot, and the wheelbase was going to be stretched quite a bit while trying to keep everything as tucked as possible. He agreed to what was about to happen and we agreed to make it work!
When all was said and done, the aesthetics were left up to us a little bit, although he chose the base forest green as the foundation for what we went off of. We chose to do mix of 1990’s Fisher graphics between the downtube and the name badging, which Charlie chose as he kept calling it the “Frankenfisher.” When all was said and done, it came out looking really nice and he has followed up to tell us it’s the bike he probably rides the most out of all in his collection.
