While the European bikes were undeniably lighter and faster, the better American bikes were made with a greater emphasis on durability and ruggedness.īMX bikes are still largely made to American dimensions, and the BMX segment is one of the key sources for American sized parts. People began to associate the American dimensions with these low-end bikes, and to forget that many high-quality machines had been made to these standards. When the 1970's bike boom brought large numbers of European (and later, Asian) bikes to the U.S., the older American dimensional tolerances went into retreat, and were increasingly relegated to department store bicycles, such as Huffy and Murray. These bicycles used different standards for bottom brackets and cranks, frame tube diameters, seatposts, pedals, headsets and handlebar stems. made bicycles, often of very high quality, were built to rather different standards than those that prevailed in the rest of the world. We stock repair parts to help keep yours on the road.įrom the WW I era to the 1970s, U.S. Parts for Older American Bicycles Bottom Brackets | Frame tube diameters | Seatposts | Pedals | Headsets | Stems Visit our Catalog for a more Contemporary Shopping Experience. Ross frame black with 024, & Hi-Tec markings, gold ROSS lettering & Gold Head Badge.ĭia-Compe brake Calipers and heavy duty brake leaversParts for older American Bicycles Accessories Same bike, just different names depending on when it was sold. So for now I'm just gonna call it an '83 Force 1/Mt. Who knows exactly when it was actually assembled and sold and under which name. I found this quote from a 2006 thread 'According to my '83 /'84 /'85 Ross catalogs, the chrome Mt Hood was a '85 model, in '84 it was all black, in '83 Ross released the black 'Force One', later to be renamed in mid '83 to Mt Hood due to copyright issues with the 'Force One name.' I will continue to look for other date stamps on components to verify, but the question now is with dated components in the first Qtr of 83, and knowing that mid year was when the name change occurred. After reading through about 20 threads in this forum and finding 2 matches down to almost every component I'm guessing this is an early 83 Force 1 or later year Mt.

The seat post is dated Feb 83 & the Dia-Compe calipers are March 83.

Well I started the tear down and cleaning, and have already found 2 date stamped parts.

Ross bicycle catalog