will a Jamis Komodo work

[coyboy]

Im very interested in converting my MTB into a Cruzbike. I looked at the blog entry for suitable doner bikes and I think mine might work but it could be a little tall. It is a 16 in frame with 26 in tires. It has disk breaks front and rear and standard MTB gearing (ie low). I would eventually need to replace the tires and front crank( at least the rings) to someting more road suiatable but probable will use what I have for now. Here are a couple of pics of the bike, the first one is with me riding it to give an idea of how high (or low) the top tube is. BTW, it has an enlarged headtube, whatever that means. uses some kind of spacer to make a regular (1 1/8?) front fork work. Thanks for any feedback!

Coy Boy

 

[Charles.Plager]

Hi Coy Boy,
Doug Burton says

Hi Coy Boy,

Doug Burton says you need 4 inches from your stand over to the height of the seat. It looks like you'll (probably?) be o.k. on seat height, but it will be close.

You flip the front fork around, so the disc brake mounts will be in the way (there's no way I know of of using disc brakes on the front of a conversion, unfortunately). If you can mount rim brakes and you want to keep your fork as is (since the rest of the conversion is reversible), you can grind off the mounts. If either of those two things isn't true, you'll need to find a new fork.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Charles

 

[coyboy]

Thank you

Thanks Charles (and Doug), I had read about the front disk brakes not working. Now sure what I will do about that. I have a carbon road bike fork but Im betting it is way too narrow for the rear tire. Wish there was some way to get around the disk brakes. Perhaps a modified chainstay. But if I did that I'd proably be just as well off to go homebuild all the way. I checked the standover hight and it was around 2 inches. Of coures that is hard to measure exactly. It looks low compared to where the seat on the bike is but the bottom bracket is high on this bike so the seat is way up in the air.

Coy Boy

 

[Charles.Plager]

Hi,
If your stand-over height

Hi,

If your stand-over height is only 2 inches, I'm a little worried about the seat height.

If you look at the conversion kit, the gears don't need to fit inside the fork. So a road fork would work. But I (strongly) recommend against a carbon fork because of how the kit is attached to it. My advice would be to find a bike store where you can buy a used (road or mountain bike) fork for cheap to see what would work.

Cheers,
Charles