Unfashionable steel mtb makeover - roll it in glitter retrospective

After a few years without a mtb I picked this up cheap a while back for knocking about the woods on - a 2013 Genesis High Latitude that looked like it had been already knocked about the woods a bit, perfect! I swiftly binned the bald original tyres, plastic pedals & old lady saddle it appeared with and found suitable replacements to get going to see if it was any good, or a heavy shanner as we say round these parts.

A bike light years ahead of it's time, Bikeradar gave it a glowing 2.5 out of 5 calling it a big wheeled oddball but after a couple of mild mannered outings I thought it had promise -a nice smooth, planted ride but it just needed a bit more travel than the poxy 80mm it came with & a slightly slacker head angle. Upon stripping the forks down for a service I discovered i could solve both these problems by removing an internal travel adjust spacer, this gave me 120mm of travel instead of 80mm and a head angle of about 67 degrees instead of 69, and also making it roughly 24% more fashionable into the bargain.

Round about this time I decided I actually liked the bike & decided it would be a rolling project, a few more changes appeared in the shape of the obligatory Thomson post & stem to replace the completely functional but uncool stock parts & an On-One OG bar because oddly shaped bars were all the rage (these turned out to be actually quite nice to hold which was an added bonus). I rode it like this for a while, then I ran out of pointless changes to make to my road bikes and decided to leave them alone, my attention then wandered back to this - I decided it deserved better, so it was stripped down & I flogged the old groupset / wheels & started looking for pretty much functionally identical parts to the old stuff, but shinier.

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