Julian's Miyatas

The bike that instigated my cycling interest, then obsession; employment, then career, was my dad’s 1988 Miyata Team. He bought it new in that year, and 20 years after that I uncovered it in my parents’ basement. This is exactly the same time I started daily poring over my favourite online outlets and blogs, with Trackosaurus Rex, Fyxomatosis, Bike Snob NYC, and of course Prolly is not Probably as my go-tos. It’s a special bike for me because it started it all, especially all these years later with my current life and livelihood in the cycling industry.

The Team-Miyata is an excellent ride - the top end of their lineup in 1988 and for a few years before and after. Miyata, who also manufactured rifles, used that technology for their proprietary triple butted splined chromoly tubes, claiming that those splines that run along the inner walls of the main tubes increase stiffness and strength and allow for weight savings through thinner wall thickness. It makes sense! The bike is sportier than anything else I’ve ridden, the rear triangle is stiff, and it’s dreamily comfy.

The build is great too! I don’t know if Dura-Ace 7400 is my favourite groupset because of this bike, or rather that I like this bike so much because it has Dura-Ace 7400, but they fit together perfectly. The satiny-smooth polish is so perfect, the crankset is beautiful, and it shifts wonderfully. I chose to modernize a few components here and there while keeping as much of the original spec as I could. I love a Selle Italia Flite, so that had to happen. I mainly ride touring bikes, so a super-short Nitto Technomic and 44cm Noodle bars got me to the upright spot I wanted, along with moving the shifters up to the bar-ends with these Rivendell designed Dia-Compes. Tubular rims aren’t for me, but I think I got as close as I could with lightweight H Plus Son Archetypes and the smooth, smooth Rene Herse Cayuse Pass tires. I repurposed the old race number braze-on as a bell mount for my Crane Suzu.

Then I got hit with a plot twist. Through those endless hours of scouring the bike internet, I came across this fun database of Miyata catalogs almost 10 years after I started riding the Team road bike. Turns out Miyata made a very direct counterpart of this bike, but for mountain biking. I needed it! I set up an alert on eBay, and soon enough one popped up and I picked it up. Meet the Ridge Runner Team!

With the exact same paint job, and Miyata’s same proprietary triple butted splined Chromoly, it feels like putting these two together is reuniting estranged twin siblings.

It’s got the equivalent top-of-the-line groupset, Deore XT, and only required a few upgrades to get back in shape. I swapped out the dried and cracked tires for Fairweather’s For XC, which are surprisingly fast, quiet, and comfy. The handlebar needed to be my favourite ever, the Crumbworks-designed Nitto KT Bar, which has the added advantage of getting me more upright.

I’m really thrilled to have these two together and to ride them back to back. They feel like the museum pieces of my stable, but are also so pleasant to ride. The recent restoration articles on The Radavist have been super inspiring in the process of tuning these two back up, and it really feels like full circle from back in 2008, the year I got the Team road bike and started reading Prolly! Kyle at Tracko's community emphasis and Andy at Fyxo's build galleries feel very much a part of all this, too. The cherry on top of this project is that my friend James, who I of course met through bikes, heard about my blue and yellow Miyatas at the Philly Bike Expo. A couple months later, I got some surprise mail with this perfect match of a Miyata cap - thanks James!

Photos by Troy @killiskii