Bike of the Day: DBR V-link 3.0

For today’s Bike of the Day, we’ll be branching out into my native bike territory: off-road cycling.

One day, early in the winter of 1986, my father came home from work with two 5-gallon pails in the trunk of our family's ’84 Buick Skylark. He called me into the garage to share his “surprise” with me. To keep things brief, he had the remains of a 1979 Yamaha 2-stroke 80 cc motorcycle. And when I say “remains,” I may be over-generous in my description of the state of this bike. We were dealing with a motley pile of rusting bits of aluminum, steel, and vinyl. All winter, to my displeasure, I shivered in the garage with my father as he pieced this bike back together. Eventually, after a few false starts, we got the bike to run. Something awoke within me during those first rides up in the Canyon with my dad. I began to “thirst” for what mountain biking enthusiasts refer to as “singletrack,” which the rest of us know as trails: the narrower, the better.

Due to lack of funds, I left off dirt-biking about the time I graduated from High School. Today, I satiate that thirst to “carve” an isolated section of singletrack on the back of mountain bike. For today’s bike, we will look at my first full suspension mountain bike: the DBR (“Diamond Back Racing”) V-Link 3.0. And here it is in all its primeval glory.


Specs:

1. XT rear derailleur
2. LX crankset
3. LX shifters
4. Avid 1.0 levers and brakes
5. WTB double-walled rims and tires
6. 5th Element shock
7. Marzocchi Z1 Bomber fork (one of the best forks that Marzocchi made)
8. Titec post, stem, and bar

Whenever I look at this bike, I inadvertently shiver—both out of revulsion and fondness. First, this bike is a constant reminder to me of my darker materialistic side. At the time I purchased this bike, I was finishing up my Senior year as an undergraduate. One of my three roommates, a man by the name of Mark Maher, was a mechanical engineering major with a serious lust for bikes. Between work and class, he and I would discuss biking and bike building. We even toyed with building our own full-suspension mountain bike frame from the salvaged tubing of abandoned bikes around campus. (He’ll enter our Bike of the Day chronicles again.)

At any rate, one day he came to me with a bike listing he had found—FOR ME—on the classified board of the student center on campus. As my mind was consumed with acquiring and building bikes, his passionate insistence that I owed it to myself to look at the bike easily wore down my resistance. That night I borrowed the car of a different roommate, stopped by the ATM, and foolishly withdrew the asking price. (I have since learned the error of my ways and no longer take money with me when viewing a bike.)

Even today, I can remember coasting out of the seller’s garage on the bike and sensing for the first time how it rode. Compared to my hard-tail (a bike with only front suspension), this bike felt SOLID and plush. The shifting was precise and the braking whiplash-inducing. You guessed it, I bought the bike with nary a quibble. All those years of bartering in Guatemala’s open-air markets for nothing. There I was, 22-years-old: no girl friend, no car, no computer. All I had to my name was approximately $300 (post-purchase), some second-hand clothes, and soon, two bikes. Obviously, I didn’t need a second bike. Even more damning, the bike was too large for me. It didn’t fit.

The sizing issue had some interesting consequences one of which manifested itself a few weeks later as spring broke. You have to know something about Utah winters to appreciate how I was feeling that day. We had just been through months of bitter cold, snow, and hazy gray inversions. Unlike Washington, Utah turns brown and dull in the Winter. Anyway, that day the sun was out and everything from campus to the lower foothills of the Wasatch Range immediately east of campus had turned a bright, translucent green.

As I rode through the Quad, my thoughts went to Rachael. We had met earlier that semester and being a young man in Spring, my fancy naturally turned to love--the love of something not quite as cold and unyielding as bikes). That day there were over a hundred people studying in the Quad, enjoying the sun, and milling around. In order to give vent to the rebirth I felt, I instinctively pulled back hard on the handlebars. I was in love, I was warm again, I would ‘wheelie’ through the Quad, and I didn’t care who saw me.

Generally when a bike is too large for an individual, the top tube (the bar that extends from the seatpost to the handlebars) is too long, stretching the rider out along its distance and limiting that rider’s leverage on the bike. Thus, it requires substantially more strength to wheelie a bike that is too big. To compensate I pulled with all 150 pounds of my might. But I failed to take into account the boost that infatuation would give to my otherwise underwhelming strength. And there before those hundreds of people, I went over backwards landing flat on my back nearly in the dead center of the Quad with a loud crack. The bike scooted ahead narrowly missing some pedestrians, my books scattered across the sidewalk, and a hush fell on the crowd. Heh . . .

Someone asked if I was okay.

“Oh yeah. I'm just fine.” I said through clenched teeth and a forced smile. Then I limped over to my bike, crammed my books back into my pack, and rode the rest of the way home a humbler me. Vanity is a cruel master.

A couple of months later, I tried to sell the bike to buy a wedding ring. For two weeks no one bit. Then one day I came out of class to find the bike missing. I was crushed. I was banking on the proceeds from the sale of that bike to cover my first of two installments on Rachael’s ring. The next day I mentioned the theft to my dad. My father, a life-long insurance man, pointed out that I was still covered under his homeowner’s policy. The policy had a clause that covered the replacement price of the bike less $500. After some research, I determined the bike must have been worth $1,600 new. In retrospect, I realized I undervalued the bike.

In any event, I came away with $1,100 which covered my first installment on Rachael’s ring. Today, all I have to show for the bike is my own wedding ring: a plain titanium band that the jeweler threw in when I purchased Rachael’s ring for an extra $25. Titanium may scratch, but it never bends.