Photographer, world adventurer and all round nice guy, Dan Milner (not to be confused with the editor of another mountain bike magazine) has put together what he is calling a ‘Klunker Re-Imagined’. Before all the retro-purists rush out to buy more pitchforks, give him a chance to explain his reasoning.

Dan reckons that our pursuit of ‘bigger, slacker, faster, more’ has made bikes heavy and sluggish. There needs to be a return to do it all bikes that can still take on it all…

In what seems almost another world now, there were the first mountain bikes. Big and heavy, these modified cruisers catapulted Californian beatnicks down dusty fireroads, leaving shreds of skin in their wake. This gravity-grabbing episode is well documented, but less so is how these Klunkers also opened up a new world of bike adventure — riding trails further into the hills of Marin and Crested Butte than hiking boots could triumph.

Let’s start by watching Dan’s video all about it. Dodgy US accent; model’s own.

The original Klunker launched mountain bike adventure, but the adventure genre today has a problem: our bikes are getting heavier, again. Plush suspension, a huge 510% gear range cassettes, dropper posts and phenomenal stopping power now render the most technically challenging, burliest trails into grin-popping playgrounds, up and down. Ever longer and increasingly slacker, enduro bikes can eat everything the hill throws them, but this unparalleled trail-taming ability comes with a weight penalty. Wider bars, fatter rims, thicker forks, heavier tyres and inserts, and extra carbon layers have added weight —and that weight is no friend during multi-day adventures, when you’re hauling yourself up a steep mountainside in search of far-flung rewards.

I’m no stranger to such hauling, having heaved my bike over countless lung-punishingly high peaks in remote corners of the planet —from Afghanistan to North Korea— searching for unknowns and endless singletrack. Despite popular opinions that fretting about bike weight is a fad for XC racers, I know how heavy a bike can feel after hours of having it on my back or days spent pedalling up a seemingly never ending climb, so the dream of building a lighter but uncompromised expedition-capable bike has long been playing on my mind.

Enter the K.L.UNK.E.R re-imagined: as in the Kwickest-Lightest-UNKompromised-Expedition-Rig I could build. (Geddit?) The target was a bike that, while giving a respectful nod towards the adventurous frankenbike Klunker builds of old, would be lighter than my everyday enduro trail-slayer, but one that I could still ride how I wanted to, down any trail my adventures led me without fretting about durability or reliability. After all if you’re going to take a bike to the ends of the earth, then you’d best make it back again to share the tale and enjoy the ride. So I looked hard at bike components for my klunker that, in my experience, had proven trustworthy in the butt-end of nowhere a long way from home or a bike shop, and reached for the scales to see where I could trim off the enduro-girth.

With any component choice there’s a balance to be found between overall lighter weight and durability and cost (remember the adage, “Cheap, Strong, Light: choose any two”?), and so inevitably there are lighter, more salubrious and even purple-anodised alternatives available; these might be head turning super-bike choices for some, but they’re not the kind of kit I’d trust with my survival on remote expeditions.

Geeky as it might be, weighing all my selected components pre-build (I do the same with camera kit), gave me a better idea of where that weight is coming from, and the results were eye-opening (including a few interesting deviations from manufacturers factory listed spec weights) but the end result proved that it’s actually pretty easy to shed a couple of kilos from your enduro bike spec while still retaining most of its trail-taming abilities, and without venturing off-piste into the kind of hard to find exotic component territory that’s populated by beardwax and loansharks either. The result of my Klunker re-imagining came in at a very adventure-friendly 13.2kg.

So if you’re aiming for your own ultimate adventure bike build, here are a few places to start (spoiler alert: it gets pretty nerdy).

Pro photographer and Shimano ambassador Dan Milner has been exploring remote places on his mountain bike for three decades. His ambitious search for trails has led him through places as diverse as North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Patagonia’s sub-Antarctic islands. Check him out at danmilner.com

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Nice. A bike for riding the kind of riding I like to do.

I presume this should read. My adventure dream adventure spec within the constraints of my sponsors catalogue

Nice bike from an amazing ambassador for the sport and pretty decent picture taker too 😂

Sounds much more realistic than some of the nonsense weights thrown around the forum.

Makes my 13.6kg Occam seem fairly light.

… and without constraints of a normal person’s wallet

Hmmm, looks like someone was one article short of his contractual obligations for the year.

So it’s a downcountry, klunker, wilderness adventure bike that’s capable of being ridden up and down big hills. Think we need to come up with a more concise name, maybe mountain bike?

Was just about to say – its a general do-it-all mountain bike. Why does the bike industry seem so obsessed with giving bikes labels.

Dissector front, DHR rear? Does he ride everywhere backwards!?

Lovely thing though. 10-51t with a 28 tooth chainring would be some big hills though!

4 pot brakes and smaller rotors save weight and good for prolonged descents.

To my mind (completely unsceintific guesswork) both of those things are wrong.

Clearly in the first case, he has proved himself correct by measuring – that he has saved a fraction of weight.

But I also had in mind that a nice big heat dissipating rotor would have less fade/more consistency with the big rotors as a heat sink, giving up some of the first contact full power of a 4 piston setup thats more suited for big dollops of power for short sharp uses at high speed and/or with a heavy rider.

our pursuit of ‘bigger, slacker, faster, more’ has made bikes heavy and sluggish

Yeah, but not everyone has done this. Partly through not wanting a big heavy enduro bike and partly not being able to afford a big heavy enduro bike. Back to my lust for a RM Element. It ain’t XC, downcuntry or modern clunker, its a mountain bike.

I got one paragraph in, realised it was an advertorial and went elsewhere.

Sounds much more realistic than some of the nonsense weights thrown around the forum.

It sounds ridiculous. I’m amazed that manufacturers are pumping out kit that make it easy to build a 29lb bike with so little travel for so much money and people accept it. The weights of the bikes in the Pink Bike field test are unacceptable – not one of the trail bikes is under 30lb and they’re all over 5k.

People need to start demanding lighter bikes rather than being sold the lie that bikes are as light as manufacturers can make them for a certain strength. Mountain bikes have been around for fifty years, the technology should exist now to make them lighter as well as stronger but a lack of imagination and innovation on the part of manufacturers is stopping that happen.

People need to start demanding lighter bikes

Why? If you want crazy light stuff, it’s available, if not front and centre off the shelf.

29lb is good for a short-travel trail bike IMO.

29in has made it harder to get closer to 25lb, as we used to aim for with XC-ish bikes.

What’s more interesting to me, is how there’s now often not much weight difference between the £2.5k bike and the £5k+ bike.

Bike parts generally weigh what they need to – and you have to spend £££s to drop a couple of lbs.

i love the idea of just calling our bikes ‘mountain bikes’ and stopping there…. but there are different genres of riding and riders, that occupy very different places on the MTB spectrum (and of course in marketing speak), and those distinctions do help people identify with geometries and component choices that will be best for their riding. I ride a pretty chunky “enduro’ bike most of the time here in the Alps —which I love— but I remember riding ultra light XC hardtails here too, and theres always something about a lighter more noble bike, especially when faced with the kind of big unknowns that wild adventures present. Yeah I know the Klunker acronym is stretching it – but hey, when did I ever make an earnest serious video?

4 pot brakes and smaller rotors save weight and good for prolonged descents.

To my mind (completely unsceintific guesswork) both of those things are wrong.

I get your concern over my maths and physics, 😀 but this is the set up that works great for me, on the kind of adventure places I ride. It might not for you. I agree that a 203mm would be better at heat dissipation, but I have no fade issues with a 180mm rotor, and the thrust of this piece is to to highlight where I look to shave weight from my bike without compromising — this being one of them. Maybe I’m just not the fastest descender, and certainly a lot of trails we encounter are very nadge tech rather than flat our, which is where I like the feedback and finer control of the 4-pots. (TBH, in really remote places several days from a hospital, we generally do reel in the Strava aspirations anyway)

I got one paragraph in, realised it was an advertorial and went elsewhere.

Sorry if it came across like that.. not my intention. My idea was to try to shed some light on the kind of bike that comes with me to high altitude, wild corners of the world, and to talk about the choices and reasoning I make when building it (this comes after a couple of paragraphs in.) Of course that said, I am an grateful ambassador for some brands so it is inevitable that a bike check piece will risk looking like an advertorial (though not all these parts are from sponsors), as it would if it were about an EWS or DH racer’s bike. So yes, bike checks like this are indeed unavoidable ‘eyes on the product’ pieces, but also (I hope) give an insight into the kind of set up ridden at the edges of our sport. Certainly the support the brands give people like me, and many other globe-trotting photographers out there, helps me go and shoot the stories I do.

Another reminder that sometimes, less is more!

Dissector front, DHR rear? Does he ride everywhere backwards!?

LOL. I get where you’re coming from there —certainly there was a big move to riding DHR II as a front tyre a couple of years ago, and it left a legacy. Tyres are very much a personal choice, but they are one of the most important decisions to make on an “adventure bike” – getting the balance between weight, resilience, grip (climbing, braking and cornering), predictability and so on. That said, I tend to stick with the Maxxis design guys on this one, accepting that they probably knew what they were doing when they designed the DHR II primarily as a rear tread (big square cross blocks dish out climbing grip), and the Dissector as either F or R. But hey, it’s just the set up that works for me.

Four weak points off the top of my head:

I’ve picked up loooooads of those Fabric bottles from the side of trails over the years. They seem pretty solid when properly clicked in, but it’s not 100% clear when you post the bottle whether you’ve clicked it in correctly or not.

Similarly – I stopped using King headsets back before King started licensing / using the Dia Compe conical washer. Over a certain A-C length it was practically impossible to keen the headsets set up perfectly. I’ve used Hope ones ever since.

Mavic wheels tend to be a bit proprietary about spokes – these may be different, of course, but spares might be a bit of a pain

A press fit bottom bracket – really? I’d be chucking a Wheels or Hope adapter in there ASAP. I don’t think I’ve had a PF BB last more than 1,000km

Pro photographer and Shimano ambassador Dan Milner has been exploring remote places on his mountain bike for three decades. His ambitious search for trails has led him through places as diverse as North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Patagonia’s sub-Antarctic islands. Check him out at danmilner.com

People need to start demanding lighter bikes rather than being sold the lie that bikes are as light as manufacturers can make them for a certain strength.

I agree. With the advanced materials and engineering knowledge that all areas of engineering have learnt I don’t understand why good engineering and design is not producing lighter bikes. The cynic in me thinks it’s because it’s easier to engineer a heavier bike and the marketing / warranty department have an easier time. If you can make a frame 500g heavier due to more material and get away with it then why bother to engineer it properly

I think the problem for manufacturers when it comes to weight is the diversity and ability of many riders these days. Bikes are so capable these days, you could make your short travel frame lighter and it could be fine for a light skillful rider but there’s no guarantee it’s not going to be bought by an 18 stone rider who’s going to huck it off a 1.5m drop. No manufacturer wants a rep for bikes that break and riders expect decent warranties. I imagine a combination of these 2 things will lead to a degree of over engineering to keep on the right side of weight/strength ratio. When I started biking it wasn’t unusual for a rigid bike with cantis to weigh 29lb. When you consider what a modern bike is capable of it’s amazing they’re as light as they are.

an 18 stone rider who’s going to huck it off a 1.5m drop

I think that manufacturers/magazines/whatever should be quoting bike weights without tyres (rather than without pedals). Tyre choice makes a big difference in overall bike weight.

rider who’s going to huck it off a 1.5m drop ride it down an ‘easy red’ having battered it the day before on a DH track

Very nice I don’t see the Klunker in it anywhere.

Nice. A bike for riding the kind of riding I like to do.

Agree. In fact I agree so much it *is* the bike I use for the kind of riding I do.

my spec is bit more mis-matched ( 11 speed XTR, hope E4s, DT 1501) because thats what I already had. but it does build into a nice, comfy, light engough bike for riding around all day.

So it’s a downcountry, klunker, wilderness adventure bike that’s capable of being ridden up and down big hills. Think we need to come up with a more concise name, maybe mountain bike?

I love the idea of ditching the tags and calling it all mountain biking, just like it was back in the 1980’s. But things have (thankfully) moved on with our bikes since the Klunkers and rigid 15-speed Raleigh Mavericks. As soon as specialisations in the sport appeared (albeit mostly through racing) we were destined to embrace different frame designs and geometries, and diverging demands on components. I’d argue that the industry tags that arose (DH, Freeride, XC, Trail, Enduro, Downcountry, etc… and even the glorious K.L.UNK.E.R, along with its soon to be BAFTA nominated voice over 😆!) help us riders identify the kind of bikes that best suit our own preferred type of riding. And of course (cynically) allow marketing peeps to get excited. It is all mountain biking and of course many of us like to blend the categories and not be pigeon-holed, but even the DH bikes that were part of what was ‘just mountain biking’ in the early 90’s, with their triple crown forks and heavy builds, were already becoming a different breed to the lightweight bikes most of us were riding, and wouldn’t have fared well on the bridleways we looked for —just as my Cannondale M800 and 35mm-travel Pace RC35 forks wouldn’t have fared great on the DH tracks then. Both were ‘mountain biking’, but the distinction in genres helped riders find what they were aspiring towards.

Mountain biking isn’t tennis: it’s much more divergent. (he says inviting a torrent of abuse from tennis enthusiasts, that inevitably leads to a forum debate over lawn vs clay..). Similarly a $150 Walmart mountain bike, with its 26” wheels, 18 gears and nobbly tyres has less off-road capability than a contemporary decent gravel bike, so perhaps we should just call them all “bikes”?

Very nice I don’t see the Klunker in it anywhere.

Yeah dont take the Klunker reference to heart…! it was always going to be a clickbait play on words and a tongue in cheek, ambitious acronym. The only cross over is the idea of building up a bike that does the job you want it to. It is crazy though, how the main focus the Klunkers history is seized by the repack DH, and less so on the actual Klunker trail riding/exploring that was going on at the same time.

I think that manufacturers/magazines/whatever should be quoting bike weights without tyres (rather than without pedals). Tyre choice makes a big difference in overall bike weight.

Good point. What a lot of people dont realise when they see a (rarely) listed bike weight is that it is listed without pedals. So you can add 400g+ to that listed weight. Back when companies commonly did list bike weights, we saw a lot of bikes supplied with lightweight tyres with very shallow treads that might be fine on the dusty trails of California or the buff Colorado Trail, but were pointless everywhere else. You still see a lot of lighter weight tyres spec’d on 29’ers, for the same reason -to keep overall listed weight down. That said, maybe the industry is assuming you will likely change the tyre for something more suitable to your home trail conditions anyway? Just like swapping out the saddle. These are things we offered to do in the shop for free on a new bike when I worked in a bike shop in Bristol even in the early 1990’s. Do shops still do that?

Four weak points off the top of my head:

Thanks for those points. Certainly I havent had any problems with CK headsets, and the PF BB have been fine, if you accept they aren’t for life —and yes a threaded converter would be a great (if heavier) option for the long game. We always take spare spokes for our wheels on our adventures and expeditions —its imperative, so it doesnt really matter if the spokes are proprietary. You will likely not find a bike shop, let alone spokes for any 650 or 29 wheel no matter how regular the spokes they’re laced with, in many of the places we’ve gone, or if you do, they’d be a few days drive away from where the breakage happens. Spokes are not a big heavy spare part to take with. Ditto with derailleur hangers (although Sonam at the Dawn to Dust bike shop in Kathmandu turns out a decent variety of home made, machined brass billet hangers – amazing!). Our group spares also include a rear mech, brake bleed kits, chain links, a gear cable, and a spare tyre or atleast a tyre patch.

… and without constraints of a normal person’s wallet

I get ya, though when I first filed this piece, the ed suggested it didn’t have enough of the ‘exotic’ rare to find, uber-elitist, anodised, lust-merchant parts in the build! I guess you can’t please everyone all the time eh.

People need to start demanding lighter bikes rather than being sold the lie that bikes are as light as manufacturers can make them for a certain strength.

What would the mechanism behind people ‘demanding lighter bikes’ look like? Petitions? Street riots? Interpretative dance?

Also, does a light bike really make much difference apart from when you’re carrying the thing? Often people seem to confuse ‘light’ with ‘fast rolling’, but while light changes the feel and acceleration of a bike slightly, does losing, say two kilos from the weight a mountain bike really make a significant difference over the course of a day in the saddle?

I’m not sure it is all that clear that bikes could be massively lighter if the feckless manufacturers only knuckled down a bit.

Or at least, not within the constraints of function and budget.

I have a really light MTB, it’s sub-11kg. And it got there by being tiny and sketchy: 26er QR wheels, flexy straight-steerer 32mm stanchion Reba, short/high/steep hardtail frame, no dropper, relatively narrow bars, single speed. It is fun to ride, but nothing like as capable as my modern 29er hardtail, and to be honest I mostly notice the weight difference when lifting them over gates.

I’m not saying weight doesn’t matter since of course it does within some limit; but rather that so long as the bike is “light enough” weight reduction is a game of diminishing returns, and doesn’t trump function or budget for the average rider.

Also, does a light bike really make much difference

I’d say in most regular situations then perhaps the bike weight (so long as its reasonable) doesnt make a massive difference to a 2 hour loop —especially if the terrain we’re riding calls for a heavier-hitting build and going light means compromising the resilience or ride quality. We have to realise that the pace we’re hitting trail features now is a lot heavier and harder (often without necessarily a lot more skill) than we used to, so beefing up bikes was inevitable in an industry fearing law suits. But then a lighter bike does make for a more nimble ride, and genuinely feels less like dragging an old mule along a trail on all-day (or multi day) endeavours. Adventure means enjoying the climbs too, not just enduring them for the gravity reward. A lot depends on rider-weight:bike-weight ‘ratio’ too, just as the bigger wheels don’t necessarily cut it for shorter riders. A 2kg lighter bike might spell a lot more difference to a 55Kg rider than a 80Kg rider, and the latter might benefit from heavier duty components. Much also comes down to geometry. Long bikes with long chainstays don’t feel as energetic on climbs as a rule, and along with more weight (especially when carrying — my riders know that 4 hour hike-a-bikes are typical on my trips) can turn an adventure into a grind. As TomParkin says above, weight reduction is a game of diminishing returns. You have to find your own sweet spot.

Firstly, piss off trying to get me to subscribe to read an advertorial.

Secondly, your bike is too heavy. 33lbs for an XC race bike is 10lbs too much.

The only acceptable additions to the “bikes are just heavier now and these additional weights are good” category are: Tyre inserts, wider tyres, wider (to an extent) rims, larger cassettes and dropper posts. To counter this; suspension is lighter, carbon is better, carbon wheels are priced to the masses and machining has improved tenfold.

Ignoring my belief that most people are overbiked and under-skilled (I’m just appropriately biked and under-skilled; and the popularity of electronic motorbikes says people are under-fit as well), XC bikes should be 24lbs or less (and that’s full suspension, hardtails should be under 21lbs). Trail bikes should be 24-28lbs. An enduro bike should be 28-30lbs.

Things that are making your bikes heavy; too much suspension, steel frames because you’re a hipster, steel railed saddles, chunky stems, heavy lock-on grips, cushcore inserts (rimpact are 300g lighter across both wheels, a whole pound), DH casing tyres on xc bikes, cheaply made frame hardware, handled thru axles, lazy thick paintjobs, 14-pot brakes.

You don’t need these things for the nant bield pass (you can ride it on a 21lb xc hardtail), and you really do not need these things for two laps of Barry Knows Best then a cake in the Peaslake cafe.

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