1992 Trek 9500 Suspension Mountain Bike
1992 Trek 9500 mountain bike
As of today, mountain bikes have been around for only about forty years. Design-wise, there has been quite a bit of progress in that short amount of time.
This Trek 9500 from 1992 shows us some great leaps forward as well as some serious stumbles in mountain bike evolution.
Highlights include Shimano’s first edition XTR mountain bike component group. The engineering was superb, the cold-forged components were built to last for decades, and this group included many fantastic features like rapid-fire trigger shifting that we still use today.
Trek’s DDS3 suspension fork had some nice touches too. It used a schraeder valve to fill the air chambers unlike Rock Shox’s needle valve of the time, and the adjustable air-sprung fork was closer to what we use now than the brief bike industry-wide foray into elastomer bumper forks.
DDS3 suspension fork
The donut stack was temperature sensitive
The first XTR derailleur
We’ll give Trek a small break as we describe the rear suspension design (since it was designed in 1991), but we still need to give the Wisconsin based company some grief. The spring unit attached to the swing arm was made out of urethane donuts… Which was obviously temperature sensitive… Which should have been clear to anyone designing a bike in a place that reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and twenty below zero in the winter. So obviously the rear suspension reacted differently in different weather. Sometimes it felt like a rigid frame (with something seriously wrong) and sometimes it felt like the tires had just gone flat (and wouldn’t spring back).
A long stretch
Front end detail
Trek badge
Overall, the bike bobbed a bit like an inch-worm with little spring rebound control and no suspension isolation from pedaling forces… But it was a decent first attempt.
This bike came from Reliable Cycle, our Classic Cycle satellite store in the Rolling Bay neighborhood on Bainbridge Island. This bike was part of the regular inventory, and it got folded into the museum collection when the store closed in 1998.