Welcome to my Surly Long Haul Trucker (LHT) bike build blog

What's this blog about?

On this blog I'll be documenting the build process of a bike based on the Surly Long Haul Trucker frameset (frame and forks).  As I source the various parts for the bike, I'll be adding comments about the thought process involved and on any problems I encounter along the way.  There will be copious amounts of photographs as well. :)

Surly Long Haul Trucker 26" Black Frame

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The need for a new bike came about after my old bike - a 10 year old Marin Nail Trail hard tail - unfortunately fell apart at the seams and was no longer usable.  Basically a crack developed around the bottom bracket shell and eventually this gave way, separating the chainstays from the BB shell and obviously rendering the frame/bike useless.

Cracked bottom bracket shell, thankfully it cracked at the TOP of a hill. :)

All very sad (I'd had a lot of good riding out of that bike) but actually I had been expecting it to happen for a good 1-2 years.  The crack looked like it could just be paint flaking away at the welding joint, although after 9-10 years I did tend to think that it was more than likely to be a frame failure as well, so it wasn't entirely unexpected when it finally gave way.

Marin Nail Trail in happier times - all loaded up for a camping trip in Edale in 2004

Anyway, this was the perfect opportunity to start anew and build a brand new bike from the frame up!

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Why build a bike from scratch?

Good question!  There are plenty of decent enough bikes out there to be bought 'off the shelf' but over the last 10 years or so as I've been getting back into biking more and more, I've found I really enjoy tinkering with bikes - taking components apart, servicing things, putting them back together again... all strangely therapeutic as it goes.  I find my mind tends to just clear as I work on my bike and for that short amount of time I am working on the bike, I can just relax and enjoy it.

Another reason - linked to the above - is that there's a real sense of accomplishment about spending time building something up yourself and then being able to stand back and say 'I did that!'.  Anyone can shell out a stack of notes on a brand new bike, but if you're buying the parts and putting them together yourself there's an extra bit of pleasure involved with that I think.

Incidentally a more condensed version of all of this ^ Zen-like process is building bike wheels.  This is also something I've done a few times over the last 5 years or so and the wheels I've built myself have never had any problems at all or needed to be trued (well, I have trued them but really it was nothing at all and I could easily have gotten away leaving it).  And it's actually quite easy to do after a little bit of practice and a few specialist tools (though you don't actually need any tools at all really apart from a spoke key)... maybe I'll add something on that at some point I don't know.

Which leads me on to another reason for building my own bike - I only have myself to blame if something goes wrong!  And if something does go wrong then I know straight away probably why it went wrong and how to fix it.  Compare this to relying on a bike shop to build your bike / repair it / service it and ... well to be fair you'd probably be just as well off in terms of having a 'good bike', and you could probably save yourself a shed load of time but hey where's the fun in that!

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Who am I?

Slightly esoteric question!  I'm a guy in the UK who enjoys riding bikes.  'munk' has been my online nickname for the last 10-15 years.  I used to run a personal site at munk.me.uk but for one reason or another I decided to mothball it since I wasn't really updating it as much as I used to.

I have absolutely no connection to Surly Bikes in the US whatsoever, and perhaps I'll have to change the title of this blog at some point because it does give the impression perhaps that 'Surly Munk' is a chap called Munk who is employed by - or somehow connected to - Surly.  Again, this is NOT the case, I am not affiliated with Surly in any way.  I just happen to have chosen Surly as the manufacturer of a bike frame because of numerous positive recommendations online and because the Long Haul Trucker frame happened to fit my 'design spec' appropriately (primarily that I wanted to be able to haul a load of stuff around, but still have a reasonably agile frame!).

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Another thing...

I'm actually writing this blog AFTER I've (more or less) finished building the bike(!?!).  Along the way I've taken a lot of photos and made a lot of notes about the process, and of course, it's only in hindsight that I realized a blog was/is probably the best way to document the process.

The dates on the posts will be the actual dates I did the tasks etc involved in the posts, although like I say above I'll be 'pre' dating the posts back to the date I actually did things.  And having fun getting mixed up with tenses along the way no doubt!  ;)