Quoted message said:pretty darn hefty? 19 pounds feels light enough for the $200 i spent,
and with my big gigantic muscles. my point is that saying it can't be
done is a tad elitist. as with all things, when asked a question, you
have to find out what the person asking it really wants. for $200, you
can get either a new huffy, or a used, 25-pound clunker road bike. or,
you can get a clean, smooth running 19-pound fixed gear.
sure you can't have a lighter-than-air space age carbon fiber bike for
$200, but those of you who are really into biking should realize that
not everyone can spend the kind of cash that you do to achieve
perfection. the elitist thing is to say that you can't do anything
useful to a 30-pound mountain bike with $200 to make it lighter. no
you can't make it a 20-pound competition bike, but you definitely can
do something useful with it.
You didn't say $200, you said $100-150. But even with $200, you're simply
not going to be able to do very much about the weight. If you wanted to
hear "just convert it to a fixed gear/single speed, *that*'ll shed some
weight", which is true, you should have asked the question differently.
$100-150 buys about half a drivetrain worth of Deore, but that's not going
to get the weight down in any significant fashion. Unless you tell us
*more* about *exactly* what's on the bike, nobody's going to be able to
offer more than generalities. But the thing is, $100-150 isn't enough to
replace more than a few components, and unless there are some particular
components that are more heavier than others (say, the wheels turn out to
be made with cast-iron rims), there's not much point in upgrading just a
few components.
Anybody who knows enough about bikes to scrounge around in second hand
parts bins for ultracheap gear and/or to want a single-speed/fixie
conversion wouldn't be asking the question you did, unless he were setting
out to prove a point about the unhelpfulness of rbt.
In other words, I call troll.
Jasper