MTB for children

comparing hotrock 20 = £240 to islabike 20 = £250 - £80 difference?

Yes the hotrock has front suspension but they don't need it at that age and it ust make the bike heavier, the gears on the islabike were a step up too.

The Carrera Blast - again with suspension - is very good value for money at £160, but for my son the fit of the islabike was so much better than both of those.

I'm scottish I don't spend money very often but this was worth more to me.

When my boys were young we got them these Trek 3900's:



The bikes held up ok with a little more tuning than I am used too. IBoys being boys, I caught them more than once playing tag on their bikes with no respect for deraileurs or such. Plenty of times I would find their bikes laying down on the drive side etc....A year ago my eldest was ready to step up to a decent bike (he has the mtb passion) so we got this:





He loves it and treats it with total respect. He was able to pawn his well used 3900 on craigslist for about half of what it was bought for when new.

How old was your lad when you got him the Trek? Mine wil be 9 when he gets the Kona Hahanna I am building for him, I hope he doesn't play deraileur tag with the Deore LX on it!

Carl.

I believe he was nine. The bike did all right for his growing years. You can see in the top pic that was taken a three years ago, he is alreading growing (15 now). My three boys along with several other neighbor kids would gather up at the street end and have all sorts of contests on their bikes. Several of these included light contact with intent of destabilizing the other rider. A few years ago, It got to the point that on a few family rides that I made my kids maintain a three foot buffer at all times when riding by each other.
Oh the joys of parenting....
T

Double post

Comparing current with current, they're within £10 of each other. There are 2010 Hotrocks on sale for less, though. Even so, the Islabikes Beinn 20 has more appropriate brake levers and gear ratios, comes without a useless boat anchor of a suspension fork and weighs a good 5lb less.

Are there any good child friendly 24" supension forks?

I guess my real bugbear with Islabikes is that they claim to have designed around childrens needs, things like low weight and smaller levers to suit small hands, but where they epically fail is that they fit SRAM gripshift gears to their small bikes and these are not suitable for children as the action is not light at all, this is a blatant case of the bean counters getting involved in design, the design for a childs bike should be for the lightest action possible and this is via a trigger shifter.
I had to replace the SRAM X3 on my lads bike for Shimano Alivio and Acera kit as he could not upshift at all and X4 is no lighter.

I guess the hotrocks were 2010's, but my LBS offered me a current model for £190 when i was looking.

As for the fork well yes it does add weight but it is far from useless for a child who hasn't learned the art of popping up the front wheel when going up kerbs or over roots it is very useful, saving him and his bike from a tumble.

Carl.

There's no ideal solution to this. There's a minimum hand size for triggers - if the nipper doesn't have a long enough thumb they're stuck. Short of designing a child-specific shifter (as Islabikes did for brake levers) it's a compromise one way or the other. Although it seems an odd bugbear given that the same shifters appear on the Hotrock...

As for bean counters, how big an outfit do you think Islabikes is?



Fair enough. At that sort of price differential the Hotrock is definitely quite compelling. And it does look cool, in a "shrunk modern MTB" kind of way.



You're right, how did anyone ever learn to ride a bike before suspension forks came along?

Again, it's a compromise. Having seen how hard my eldest has to work on moderate (by adult standards) inclines, the last thing she needs is another couple of kg on the bike. Choice is good, though

You get dirtjumper (4) in 24inch sizes but I think they are oem and can't bought separately - quite heavy though, for 20" you can order proper forks designed for recumbants but they are around the 150-200 mark. Sometimes you find RST capa8's on ebay - they are ok and have preload and lock out.
Retrowise Ballistics look ok but are easier to get stateside than here.

I have seen cut down pace forks but they were special.

Simplest solution would be to get 26'' rigid disk forks that haven't been suspension adjusted and fit those to a 24 frame. 410 a-c should be about right.