A few months ago I wrote a heartfelt post on my relationship breakdown with my mountain bike. I was feeling very low and things were very bad between us, but after a lot of soul searching I’d realised the fault was 98% mine and if things were going to have any chance of working out I needed to make some serious changes and put some proper effort into fixing what had gone wrong between us. There’s a link to the post here if you need to catch up : https://thedecliningcyclist.com/2024/09/22/when-a-relationship-breaks-down-falling-out-of-love-with-your-bike/

The first thing that had to happen was a serious think about what my biggest issues were with the Cotic, and what was the best way to solve them? In no particular order these were the areas I identified as needing a rethink:-

1/ The suspension performance both front and back was pretty underwhelming. The Rockshox Pike front forks had been bought new when I built the bike, but they had always been a bit lacking over the smaller bumps were they tended too feel harsh and the damping to quick to return whatever settings I’d tried for the compression and rebound. At the back the Rockshox damper had been an eBay special, purchased because it was the only reasonably priced secondhand unit I’d been able to find at the time. It held air fine, but I had no idea of its history and it was probably past due a rebuild. So there was definitely work to be done on the bounce absorption at both ends.

2/ I’d never been happy with the drivetrain, I’ve written before about how disappointed I’d been in the performance of the Sram NX groupset I’d originally fitted, and although the Box2 rear mech, shifter and cassette I’d bought second hand had been an improvement I still wasn’t overly happy with the way the bike swapped cogs, oh and the Sram NX bottom bracket and crankset that still remained fitted was starting to feel pretty rough and the preload adjuster was cracked.

3/ The riding position I felt I’d never got right. I always felt as if I was wrestling a wide horned Texas steer around the trails …. Conforming to what the internet and looking at other bikes in the trailhead carpark told me was the way to go a set of super wide 790mm riser bars had been coupled with a 50mm stem with plenty of spacers underneath which had resulted in a wide and high front end and I was now wondering if this was maybe the cause of the bike feeling so slow and ponderous around the tight twisty stuff.

So with work to do on almost every aspect of the bike it was time to break out the spanners and of course my wallet. One quick evenings work reduced the Cotic to this state:

Then it was time to retire to the computer and search out the most cost effective way to try and get the bike where I wanted it to be without breaking the bank or alerting Mrs DecliningCyclist’s suspicions. After several evenings furtive internet shopping boxes started to arrive at DecliningCyclist HQ.

The drive train was the easiest thing to sort, go back to what you know is reliable and previous experience tells you will work how you want it to. Shimano SLX doesn’t break the bank, works well and the shifting is reliable and accurate. The only slight wrinkle is the Cotic is a ‘Boost’chainline frame and after fitting the appropriate Boost SLX chainset I just couldn’t get what to my perhaps overly fussy eye was an acceptable chainline. The Boost spec Sram chainset had fitted fine, but the Shimano one not so much. An evening spent pouring over the wisdom of the internet only proved that everyone had a different opinion, and the only consensus was that there were far to many component standards, and not everything that was supposed to work together would. In the end I ordered a secondhand SLX non boost spec crankset from eBay to see if that solved the issue and lo and behold it instantly gave me a decent chainline at both ends of the cassette without trying to bend the chain like a stir-fry noodle.

With the gears now swapping cogs as I wanted them it was time to turn my attention to the suspension. With the rear shock removed from the frame I gave all the multiple pivot points of the rear end a good clean and checked them for play and nasty graunching noises, luckily all was good. Upgrading the rear shock took a couple of attempts, the Cotic takes a 200x57mm rear shock and like so many mountain bike standards this particular size seems to have fallen out of favour in recent years. Not many options new, but there are plenty available secondhand. I found a suitable Fox Float shock on eBay listed as fully serviced and rebuilt with all new parts by a seller with an eBay shop dedicated to refurbishing mountain bike suspension component’s. His feedback was good so ‘buy it now’ was selected and I waited….. and waited ….. and waited… I send polite queries asking if the shock had been dispatched and heard nothing. I sent slightly more forceful messages asking what was going on. I then sent rude messages asking for my money back ….. and heard nothing, nada, zip. Eventually I had to raise a complaint with eBay and PayPal which took time but eventually I did get a full refund. (The seller never responded to any of my messages or even to the dispute and refund claim I raised through eBay 🤬)

Once the burning sensation in my fingers had died down I found a website in Germany that were selling brand new RockShox RC3 Debonair’s in the right size with a spare rebuild seal kit thrown in for the same price I’d paid for the secondhand Fox shock, and after purchase it arrived within 3 days. While the rear shock debacle was dragging on I wasn’t idle. The front forks were stripped cleaned and rebuilt carefully with all new seals and fresh oil. I didn’t find anything particularly wrong with them that would explain their relative ack of suppleness apart from RockShox’s tendency to apply what I would consider rather excessive amounts of internal grease (sram butter they catchily call it) to all the moving parts especially the air damper.

With the fork back together and slotted back into the frame I had a think about the riding position. This was the easiest to sort and cost me nothing. I just had a look through my collection of handlebars that I’d kept ‘just in case’ over the years, chose a zero rise bar that was 710mm wide and swapped it for the 790mm wide 20mm riser bar that was fitted. I also moved all the spacers previously under the stem to above it to really slam the bars lower compared to the previous setup.

Now I’m not going to lie to you and say I jumped straight on the bike after all this work and it was transformed into the absolute off road weapon I always knew it could be. In fact the first ride was a little underwhelming. After making such a radical change to the bar and stem setup the bike initially felt bloody awful for the first few miles I rode it, and inevitability that first ride was punctuated by a fair few stops where the Allen Keys were whipped out to adjust the position of the brake levers, gear shifter etc which made it difficult to get into the flow. Then I made the slightly daft decision to point the bike down the Black trail which I hadn’t attempted for months. This went predictably badly and I kept having to apologise to people who caught me up as I teetered down the descents with the brakes locked almost solid. Not a great first ride. Suitably chastised I went for a second lap of the much more suitable and benign Blue trail after a spot of lunch and there were now encouraging signs. The gears were working so seamlessly I wasn’t thinking about them which meant they were a definite upgrade and the suspension felt much better, although the new rear shock has a lot more adjustability than the old one so some playing with the settings are in order. Once I’d got more familiar with the new riding position it felt promising enough for me to want to persevere with it, the front end seemed more responsive and the bike felt more eager to change direction than before which was helping to put the smile factor back into the ride that had been sorely missing before.

Since that last ride which was before Christmas my off road riding opportunities have been a bit limited but I did manage to dust off the Cotic yesterday and get some miles on to it around some Welsh Forrest. The bike is now much more how I wanted it, is it perfect ? no but we are certainly moving in the right direction. I now need to make time to ride it enough to be able to be familiar enough with it to make tweaking the bike further more targeted and less about guesswork, but it’s second coming has been successful in making me want to ride it again and that’s at least 1/2 the battle. A days Mountain Biking is just more effort than just grabbing the road bike out of the garage, kit has to be found, checked and loaded into the car (because you don’t want to drive for hours and then find your shoes or helmet are still at home), the bike rack has to be exhumed from the shed and bolted onto the towbar. When you take the driving into account to and from the trail centre it’s a full days commitment of time. When you’re pretty sure you’ll not be enjoying yourself when you get there it makes it (at least for me) much more likely that I’d be pulling out the Lycra Bib Shorts and the road bike than pulling on the baggy shorts and loading up the car. Hopefully spending all this time and money rekindling my relationship with knobbly tyres will reverse this trend, here’s hoping for a muddy spring!