1992 10th Anniversary

As I’ve been making my way through each of these writeups this is the one I’ve been looking forward to the most, this is quite possibly one of the best vintage MTBs I’ve ever had the pleasure of owning and riding. The bike featured here is a part of my small personal fleet and since its addition to the lineup in 2023 it’s remained in high rotation among bikes like Cunningham, WTB Phoenix, Mantis Valkyrie and Doug Bradbury Manitou to name a few. It is the bike that sold me full tilt on Fat Chance as brand that should be ranked high among any respectable collectors list of bike to include their fleet.

Growing up I did not have much awareness of the Fat Chance brand. We did have a dealer in State College, the now defunct Eddie’s cycles but they seldom had one in the window display and you’d be hard pressed to spot one on the trails. So when I started collecting bikes as a <cough-cough> adult they were not a brand I prioritized for inclusion in my personal lineup. At the time I was focused on Kleins and Yetis as those were the IT bikes of my youth. I did end up restoring quite a few Fats over the years, but for whatever reason they were always too small and therefore I really didn’t have a chance to ride a Fat Chance until well into my life as a collector. The first Fat I finally built for myself was a 1990 Yo Eddy around 2014/2015. I ended up putting that bike into regular rotation, loaned it out a lot and it quickly proved itself as a very capable and reliable bike. The problem was it never felt special, it was like a very nice Toyota. Always worked, always did its job, took the punishment but it was missing that certain je ne sais quoi, I don’t know… flair, grace, or style – it just felt like a blunt instrument when what I wanted was transcendence. The stay with me for over two years, which is saying something, but I didn’t mourn selling it and worse didn’t look to replace it.

Fast forward a couple years and the family and I are on a skit trip in Park City, and naturally as one does I’m looking through the local marketplace looking for bikes, no I didn’t just stumble on a mint 10th Anniversary Fat. I did however find a very nice set of VAR frame tools at an attractive price a few towns over. So, one afternoon I took a quick road trip to Heber to have a look see. I ended up meeting Murray, former bike shop owner in the 90s clearing out some old, unused stuff.  We got to talking and I told him what I did with Second Spin, blah blah blah and he said he had a few old bikes. Right in the house he had an old Klein Pinnacle, a Mountain Klein and a Klein road bike. “Cool” I said, feigning excitement. He asked what other bikes I was interested in and I rattled off the usual list. “Oh yeah, I used to be a Fat Chance dealer…” he said as I started to text my wife to pick me up, “In face my former partner in the bike shop and I managed to convince Chris to build us two custom 10th Anniversary Fats in Large, only ones ever built” he continued. “Oh yeah?” I replied, glancing up from my phone “Do you still have it” I replied, almost reflexively at this point. “Yes” Murray shot back as if there was some other possible reply. Ok, now we’re cooking with fire. “Wait here a moment” Murray said as he went outside, only to return a moment later with this.

For the casual visitor or mere fan of bikes who doesn’t necessarily collect with a deep rooted passion allow me to clue you into a little bit of the psyche. Collecting something, anything, comes loaded with period of immense highs, searching for something, catching a trail or whiff, finding it and then getting it. In the case of bikes, at least for me there is also the element of riding it which enables you to extend beyond those early peaks. Those peaks however are often broken up by very deep and sudden nadirs or troughs. I had unknowingly just walked into what would become a roller coaster of highs and low which would continue for the better part of the next year and change. Murray wheeled out the bike you see above and a big a fair amount of pride in his voice said something like “Here, what do you think?”. Again, almost as a reflex I asked “Do you have the original rigid fork?”, to which he replied “yeah I think so” <heart rate increases>. “Play it cool man” I say to myself, the game’s afoot. I proceed to look over the bike. Up until this point I had written off owning a 10th Fat as they only over made them in M/L which is marginal for me in terms of size. So, I’m doing my very best to contain my excitement at learning that they did in fact make them in Large and that I found one. The rest is a bit of a blur, but Murray did go on to say that it took a lot of convincing before Chris made them the two bike (serial log book says three) as Chris didn’t think the True Temper OX3 tubing was strong enough to make such a large down tube out of and have the resulting bike live up to Fat’s standards for strength. In the end he ended up using down tubes from a large Yo Eddy (or so Murray said) to make the two frames for him and his co-owner, and maybe another tube set. Again, according the to the Fat Chance serial number log book three frames were made. Murray’s bike is 182 and Murray was told it was the last one made (S/N 182A3L) making it kind of an 11th Anniversary, but who’s counting. While it received the custom anodized headtube badge, it is not laser etched with the serial number make this particular bike a sort of unofficial, while the other bike (#181) did receive an etched badge for some reason. I don’t know if 183 was actually made, where it went or where it is now. Nor do I know the fate of the other bike, Murray and his partner lost touch and I was unable to track him down.

A few years later I had the rare and I think very cool privilege to have the very first and last (as I knew it) 10th Anniversary Fat Chance bikes together in one spot. I will do a detailed post of #1 10th Fat at some point, but aside from a sharper transition in the silver to purple fade it’s basically the same as all the others.

Ok back to Utah. Naturally the conversation ended on me asking Murray whether he’d consider selling the bike. Queue the low, “Nah, I don’t think so” his reply came as a shattering blow to my raging. excitement. I politely acknowledged and kept looking at the bike. The build was not what I’d want, there was a small ding in the top tube, but otherwise it was in amazing shape (he sent me photos of the fork a few weeks later). We agreed to keep in touch and I happily walked out with a nice set of tools. And that’s how they say is that… or was it.

Murray and I kept in touch, but I didn’t push too hard. He was gearing up for an extended cross country trip and didn’t really feel like dealing with this, so the bike sort of slipped out of my mind. Queue the immense high. Then one day in the spring of 2019 or 2002, either way in the peak of COVID I get a text from Murray asking if I’m still interested in the bike. He’s now thinking the road trip it more of a lifestyle change (IIRC) and he wants to sell all his bikes including the Fat. Over the next couple weeks we work out and deal and my dad drives out to his house and comes home with the Fat. It would take another couple of agonizingly long months until I finally got it home in August of 2020. Given my OCD for catalog builds there was only one way this one could go, and that’s with a full Campagnolo Record OR grouppo, which of course I didn’t have. As I set out to complete the kit I decide to have the small ding in the top tube fixed and sent it off to Rick at D&D Cycles in California. Rick did a masterful job of smoothing out the ding, which wasn’t more larger than a pea but still there. At this point I can’t even remember where it is and there is no sign of it even under bright light. I managed to find a complete NOS Record OR group and slowly started piecing the build together piece by piece.

A little bit about the 10th Anniversary Fat Chance. Obviously designed and built to commemorate Fat’s 10th anniversary of building mountain bikes and served as significant step forward in the evolution of Fat ‘s high end design concept. Built with custom drawn True Temper OX3 and combined with the new Big One Inch (BOI) fork the frameset was touted to be lighter and livelier than its Yo Eddy brother. Built in limited (!50 at time of announcement) quantities and available in limited sizes and only in one color, silver to violet fade and built with Campy’s new flagship Record OR group it was destined to impress. The frame carried the Yo Eddy’s tried and true 71/72 head tube / seat tube angles and sporty 16 7/8″ chainstays for a sporty and attack oriented feel. The frame and fork were complemented by custom made Paragon Machine Works dropouts with the rears stamped 1982 – 1992 to commemorate the anniversary period.

Like I said up above for me the only way to with this build is Record OR. Yes many of these frames left the factory unbuilt and many of those ended up with Shimano’s brand new M900 XTR group, a better choice I’m aware but for me this is the way. Admittedly a decision driven largely by aesthetics which I would later come to regret somewhat, but ultimately stuck with through this day (two year later). I won’t rehash Campy’s legacy  in the mountain bike market, but suffice it to say their early attempts were terrible. The was all supposed to change with the introduction of the all new, 8-spd Record OR grouppo. The previous entry (Euclid) was both heavy, by most accounts ugly and clunky and really didn’t perform well at all. The new offering was sleek, shiny, svelte and promised exact performance – I mean it came with a German chain, that alone should fix everything. However it was all too little (when compared to Shimano’s slick M900) and most definitely too late and by 1995 Campy would exit the MTB component market, never to return. Still it looked amazing, paraphrasing from Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2 “My Piéta. It’s completely elegant, it’s bafflingly beautiful, and it’s capable of reducing the population of any standing structure to zero”, only I’d replace the last part of that with “capable of misplacing shifts and loosening brake pads during most critical stages of a ride” Just look at those cranks, the brakes and levers and the derailleurs, simply stunning. My experience with this group has been by and large pretty good, the shifting is actually pretty crisp and aside from one or two times when the front shifter seemed to drop a gear, it’s worked pretty well. Where it falls significantly next to Shimano is shifting under load. Neither the main chainrings or the rear cassette have ramps or pins and so you get very little assistance in moving the chain over. So, you really have to keep your eyes out in the front and hit your shift points or be ready to stand up and hammer, which fortunately then bike loves to do. The thing I hate about this group and have always hated since the 90s are those damn brakes. I’m a decent mechanic, far from a pro but I manage and yet these brakes well damn near broke me. First I could not get them to stop screaming like a vixen in heat, no amount of bedding, toeing or sanding would do it. Finally after trying a half dozen pads I settled on gray Kool Stop Eagle 2s and they finally shut the eff up, mostly. Then you have the securing mechanism which is nearly impossible to hold in place while tightening without the pads moving, it just sucks. The brakes are a clear copy of Grafton Speed Controllers, but like seven or maybe eight times needlessly more complicated, and that’s saying something. And why did they have to use an 11mm bolt, 10mm not good enough. Assholes, now I have to carry an 11mm wrench on every ride, because you know they pads will move. I fucking hate these brakes.

Well.. time to wrap this up. I short I love this bike, I was totally hooked after 100 feet on the trail. I know you need more time to get to know a bike, hell I’ve said it myself you need like a 100 miles of seat time to get to know a bike, But, literally I knew this bike was special the minute I got onto it. Brakes and that shit aside, this bike is amazing. I know that the benchmark for a steel 26″ bike is the WTB Phoenix and there is a group of guys about to lawyer up as a consequence of what I’m about to say, but I think is quite possibly the best steel 26″ mountain bike. I had a Phoenix, and after two some odd years of riding it sold it. Now, I did that largely because I had both a Cunningham and a Ti Phoenix, and yes I did buy another Phoenix, so queue the hypocrisy comments but I can’t imagine selling the 10th Fat. It’s just such an amazingly balanced design and flawlessly executed giving you a ride that is pleasant but an stand up to very aggressive riding. The front end is light and lively, but still firmly planted and most important doesn’t have the dead sort of feel of the original Yo fork. You can easily life it over obstacles, but if you miss it track without fail and hold firm under firm brakes (that is if those piece of shit Campy brakes can provide it). The red end locks up so beautifully and predictably that you could write calligraphy with it. It’s good fast and it’s good slow and in chunk. I could use a slightly stiffer rear end of maybe wheel as with 2.25 rear tires there is contact with the chainstays under heavy loads.

In short, my recommendation is that if you can get your hands on one of these limited production and rare bikes get it. Build it with M900, or least put on some decent brakes and give it at try. I promise you will like it and if you were not a fan of Fat chance before, in the immortal words of Yoda “You will be”, and after all who are you to argue with a Jedi Master?!?