Have you ever wondered how cool it would have been , to have ridden a fat-bike, when you were a little kid? I think about it all of the time, when I’m cruising along the sandy singletrack trails or out on the beach. My bike helps to transport me back to my boyhood….riding my sting ray along the industrialized Des Plaines River, trails in the C(r)ook County Forest Preserves. There’s no question in my mind, that my fat-bike is the ‘best bet’ to invoke my personal childhood, happy place. I’ve got plenty of other kinds of bikes that I ride, depending on the flavor day and they all rock, but I really love the feel of 26 x 4. And speaking of Rock……At least we had pretty kick ass rock and roll, from before I was born all the way till when all of this is just good memories (but imagine how cool it would have been crank’n up some Zepplin cruise’n your local bandito trails on a fattie!). Kids on fat-bikes and Metal…..well that’s like peanut butter and jelly! The music in our video short is Downtrodden by Black Teeth. Nate (from Black Teeth) was a guest on the Bike Black Ribbon Hour Show # 4. The BRBH has hosted a series of folks from the bicycle cult(ure) that also happen to wrench bikes and create music. Check it out here – https://fat-bike.com/2017/05/black-ribbon-bike-hour-show-4-desert-dispatch-gnomanifesto-sledgehammer-top-5-names-to-give-your-saddle-sore-this-summer/. The original video was sent to us by Jeff & (8 year old) Cash MacFarlane. Cash is riding a 20″ Charge Cooker.
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This little-people-fat-tires idea has been on my mind, too, but from perhaps a different angle: I think the young ones might already know the truth!
I own (and generously allow my kids to use) a little BMX style bike, which is now too small for my 6 year old, but which is just right for the little sib. It’s got pretty standard 16-inch wheels with 2-inch tires. In ETRTO parlance, that’s 50-305. If we just mathematically scale-up the wheel diameter to the conventional “26-inch” (ETRTO: 559) size of fatbike rims, the 559 rim is more than 1.8x as big as the 305 rim. Applying that same multiplier to the tire, the 50mm tire on the “16-inch” bike scales up to a 91-92mm (or 3.6″ – 3.7″) tire on that “26-inch” (ETRTO: 559) wheel.
The inability of the industry to pick one (more sensible ETRTO) standard for identifying sizes makes that a bit messy, but to my eye, it looks like little kids start out on scaled-down plus/fat bikes. That makes those 20-inch (ETRTO: 406) wheels with 4″ tires even more radical, since they would scale up to more than 5.5″ on a conventional fatbike wheel!
Hey guys!
Jeff here, Cash is 10 now and still riding that little Cooker. His older sister is close to moving up to a 26″ platform so he’s got a Bahama Blue Cooker with 24″ wheels waiting.
Both kids love the fat tires and all their little friends go nuts when they see those bikes! 😀
Cheers!
Jeff