I started this project 3 months ago, and it has genuinely given me white hairs.
This usef to be all-original 1991 Scott Montana with a Shimano Exage 500LX drivetrain and a 13-30T cassette.
It was my ultimate childhood bicycle—I bought it for 35€ when I was 18 because I couldn't afford a driver's license and my parents couldn't help me out at the time. After five years of not having a working bike, buying this with my own allowance money made me feel truly free. I rode it for hundreds of kilometers on paved roads, through forests, hills, fields, flowing rivers, and dry riverbeds. I took it on dates, commuted to work, took it bow hunting, rode it in the snow (terrifying but fun), and carried it on my back for kilometers when I got flats. It kept me safe from stray dogs in forgotten villages and helped me outrun coyotes.
After two years, I finally got my driver's license and moved to a bigger town, sharing a small apartment with three girls. The bike stayed back home. I thought it was safely stored in the room with the wood-burning boiler, safe from the elements. Sadly, my dad didn't share my sentimental attachment and tossed it into an open wood shed. It sat there for 3 years.
This summer, my girlfriend and I realized we finally had space in our apartment and a ground-floor storage room, so I decided to bring it back for my daily commute. I went home expecting a preserved bike, but instead found a sun-burned, rusty frame covered in dust, ash, and spiderwebs. Miraculously, the ash seemed to protect some parts from rusting. My girlfriend and I agreed: if it’s this important to me, it’s worth fixing up.
Even as an engineer, I was always intimidated by bike mechanics—servicing cup-and-cone hubs in my childhood always felt incredibly sketchy. But I figured, hey, it’s 2026, we have AI with billions of parameters, I can totally do this.
Cue the monster operations. After multiple heavy washes and a 2 AM ADHD-fueled degreasing session, I threw it in the trunk of my GF's car and brought it to the apartment.
I started scraping off what looked like tiny rust spots, only to find it spread deeper under the paint. I neutralized the rust and, following some incredibly stupid AI advice, tried covering the spots with nail polish. Finding a color match was impossible, so it looks rough, but I plan to sticker-bomb the frame eventually to protect it anyway.
I initially chickened out on the wheels and took them to a local bike shop to be trued and have the hubs serviced. Not only did they laugh at me when they saw what bike I wanted to fix, but they returned the wheels looking exactly the same, having barely greased the hubs (I had to open them up and add more myself because they were so stingy with it). Spite is a great motivator, so I decided to buy the tools and do the rest myself using ChatGPT and old forums.
God, I bought so many wrong things.
The brake pads I ordered didn't fit the Exage set, so I had to buy completely new cantilever brakes (still unmounted). I bought the wrong headset rebuild kit because the AI hallucinated the fork dimensions despite me sending it photos. The bottom bracket length I found on a forum was totally wrong—PSA for anyone keeping the original Exage crankset: the BB is 122.5/68, NOT 113.5mm like the internet claims.
Then came the seized bottom bracket. I bought the special Park Tool HCW-4, and the pins sheared off instantly. After 6 hours of fighting, improvising, and almost throwing the frame on my kitchen stove to heat it up, I finally broke it loose using a massive pair of vice-grips clamped incredibly hard onto the cup. To my absolute shock, the frame threads survived perfectly.
Then came the tire drama. I lost two weeks waiting on MTBiker because they sent me the right packaging for my Continental Race King II 26x2.2 tires, but the actual rubber inside was stamped with a different size and obviously wouldn't seat on the rims. I struggled for hours with the rear axle after swapping the cassette because my freewheel tool wouldn't clear the drive-side nut. I had to neutralize rust deep inside the seat tube, and I did a terrible balcony paint job on the stem/handlebars, which I’ll probably just replace.
With every passing week, I realized I needed a new tool that I had to wait weeks for, a different screw, or a missing part. My girlfriend joked that I spent more time trying to MacGyver stuck bolts than actually building the bike. I inhaled more WD-40, PTFE lube, acetone, nail paint, spray paint that I don't know how am I still here, funny enough my thyroid blood tests came better than when I had a more healthy environment.
All that’s left now is applying stickers, installing the seat frame bolts, mounting the brakes, and wiring the transmission. I'm seriously considering hacking the Exage crankset to convert it to a 1x setup. The xbike is coming.
My biggest takeaway from this whole ordeal: Take anything an AI tells you or what you read on 15-year-old forums with a massive grain of salt. For any mechanical operation, just go straight to YouTube or ask people around reddit with the same setup as you.
The photos tells part of the story, the last photos are how the bike looked back in 2018, photos that make me fill up with regret thinking of how the bike ended up thrown and abandoned...
P.S.: Cats are paid actors.
