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Friday, October 22, 2010

Boys and their Toys

SOMEBODY STOP ME

So, I've been tossing this around for 2 years now. Do I purcha$e a super fat tire snow bike? Do I really need 'another bike?' I have a Trek Hard Tail dedicated to winter riding. It has 'monster' 2.3 studded knobbies that stay on the bike year round. I can ride across any ice, ice that you couldn't walk on safely. However I can't ride in deeper snow, I can't get enough traction. This year when I raced in "Triple D" and me and all the other mountain bikers pushed our bikes through 12" of snows for miles and miles until exhaustion took us out one by one, while the true snow bikes rode by us, made it to the turn around point and rode past us pushers again.

First I looked at the
Surly Pugsley, a steel bike, then Salsa came out with the MukLuk, a aluminium snow cruiser. Surly and Salsa are owned by the same parent company.
Lance Andre race director of Colesburg 40 and Triple D every year, and one of the better snow riders in the country has tried to convince me to bike the "FatBike" made by Speedway, a bike shop in Alaska. He rides the TI version of the FB and now they make an aluminium version.

I started inquiring about these three versions, and the first thing I found out the tires, that make these bikes the snow bikes that they are, were on all back order.
This concerned me with only one company making these tires.

So my first quest was to see if I could find someone with these tires in stock. Well I found them, after searching for 2 days on the Internet. The Larry Tire is designed for the front and the Endomorph is designed for the rear. Here they are sitting in my dining room. Well I guess if I bought the tires means I gotta now buy the bike.






After dealing with my local bike shop for a week and what he could do for me, it ended up the best route would be for me to deal directly with Greg at Speedway and have him build me my dream snow machine.



We talked on and off over the phone the last couple of days, hashing over the build and what parts, he would build the frame, supply some parts and I would chose later the rest of the components and so on. Greg is a friendly fantastic bike enthusiast to work with, and knows what he is talking about. If you want to go snow riding give Greg a call 907-222-1967



So to make this long lingering digressing monologue come to and end. Greg is building me my FatBike.



So this 57 years old still refusing to grow up, wanting to ride more then I do now, refusing to stop the madness is now going to ride blizzards and enjoy, yahoooooooo.

And here she is, drool!!!!



Oh if your a bicyclist and you ever read in the obituaries I have flopped over and croaked, a.k.a. kicked the bucket. Come to Dubuque to my auction, my bike stuff is growing to humongous proportions.

Rain or shine, I'm ready to ride the weekend away.

Thanks for stopping

Dave

7 comments:

Harry Legge's Cycling Blog said...

Damn! I need that bike. You're evil for showing a pic of it. How could you temp all of us addicts with that?

MrDaveyGie said...

Tom, do it, do it, do it. Did you ever buy a bike you regretted. :-)

Clive Chapman said...

Have you read Bruce's Blog mate? He's a Pugsley addict in Scotland.

Great Vids too btw.

http://coastkid.blogspot.com

mrbill said...

Let me see, what in the world would I do with that, Sand maybe? I wish I hadn't said that, now we'll probably have record Snowfall this year.

Dan O said...

Dude - for the riding you do - that snow bike will be worth every cent.

Looking forward to future post seeing those new tires mounted up and in action.

Cool project.

Steph said...

awesome. Yer gonna have all kinds of cool snow-ride bloggin stories this winter :)

Michael Lemberger said...

Sorry pal, I'm not stoppin ya.

Oh, and to pick a nit, I think it's a Fatback. Almost wished now that I'd gone that direction myself, though I do likes the 9:Zero:7...