Costco Members: 27.5" Northrock XC27 Aluminum Mountain Bike Expired

Good spec for $299 shipped.
But only comes in medium, like most big box bikes, so if you're tall or short you're out of luck.

If you aren't average size, your best bet for a cheap mountain or urban bike is probably bikesdirect.
Same price:
https://www.bikesdirect.com/produ...-bikes.htm

Keep in mind that no "mountain bike" this cheap will have a fork you can trust for hard technical riding. These are for urban riding on bad streets, bumpy gravel roads, or at best slowly picking your way around rocks. If you want to really get into technical singletrack while keeping your collarbones and teeth, your price of entry is a lot closer to $1000 than $300.

Here's a quick way to tell the level of a "mountain bike" that's usually accurate:
If the front wheel is held on by hardware store bolts, the fork and bike are trash.
If the front wheel is held on by a quick release skewer, as the Northrock and BD are, it's a low-end rough urban/gravel road bike.
If the front wheel is held on by a 15mm thru-axle, it's a real mountain bike.

Here's another way to tell the level of a bike: check how many gears are on the rear and front cluster.

7-8 speed rear, 2-3 speed front: low end, not a real mountain bike
10 speed rear, 1 speed front: cheap real mountain bike
12 speed rear, 1 speed front: medium to high end real mountain bike

Modern mountain bikes have eliminated the front shifter by using more and wider gears in the rear. Any bike with a front derailleur is either a dedicated drop-bar road bike, or a cheap pseudo-mountain bike using obsolete parts to save money.

I bought this few weeks ago for an ebike conversion. There are YouTube videos for conversion of this specific bike, that influenced my choice as I knew that components would fit. I put ~5 miles before conversion and have added >250 miles post conversion.

Here is my rundown after having used it:
- This is a cross country (XC) bike not a true mountain bike, it does extremely well on gravel and green trails.
- The seat is very comfortable, it might not look like it but I have swapped it for a cushy Bikeroo seat and came back to it. I have comfortably done ~40 miles of gravel in one day.
- Front has 3 speed chainring. I didn't care for it pre-conversion. They should have just picked the middle one and stuck with it. Post conversion I have a single chainring up front.
- Disc brakes needed truing (which will happen on any bike out of the box), but the instructions said to just let them run and the noise will go away. Not accurate, you should true your brakes. Running them will wear off your pads and yes the noise will go away, but you don't want to wear out your pads.
- Rear-derailleur needed indexing. A few turns on the barrel adjuster, limit screws were fine. Yours might not need this. You just need to know how to notice this and how to fix it. It was not too bad out of the box, it was more important to me as I was converting it to an ebike.
- From what I can tell the rear has a freewheel not a cassette. This limits what gears I can run in the back.
- The frame is old style with the disc breaks mount behind the seat stays. You will need special disc brake compatible racks (if you want racks).
- Assembly was very easy. It was 90% assembled as it says. Few tune-ups here and there which would be needed on any bike not assembled and tuned by a bike shop. None of the tune-ups were mandatory.

I want to run these tubeless in future, but I am not sure if the tires are tubeless ready. They have Maxxis IKON which are supposed to be but I could not find the model number to confirm. They are likely cheap OEM Maxxis IKON. The rim is dual walled, I expect to be able to use tape on the rim to make them compatible. I will have to check if the channels for the tire bead form a good seal for tubeless.

My main use is paved and gravel bike paths, with some green trails. It fits those use cases. It has already survived a lot of miles and has not needed any components replaced yet.

Future plans are, when I am ready to upgrade I would rather sell this and get a different bike. I don't see a great upgrade path on this bike, but I knew that before buying it.


Edit: I had a flat and took off the tire to repair it. They have a wire bead (not foldable). Maxxis tire catalog does not list the wire bead IKONs as tubeless compatible, the foldable ones are listed as TR (tubeless ready). The part number from the mold imprint is 88R-002052, which searching online returns a different model. I will not be attempting to run these tubeless.