The inevitable KID'S BIKE thread

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a bit lately cos my elder child is almost four and I think I want to get him a bike for his birthday. Is four too young? Anyone with kids that ride bikes now - what are the best bikes to get kids these days?

4 seems like the perfect age for first bike, with stabilisers etc. I wouldn't worry too much about quality at this stage as all your kids will get the use of it without putting too much wear on the bike, youc an look around for second hand and freecycle as well.

Give it a couple of years and you should be able to run a trailer bike for him as well.

my first bike was some little red and blue number with fat white tyres, stabilisers of course until that great day i finally had them removed.

my mate had an awesome three wheeler with a cool carrier box on the back, every kid in the area wanted to ride it.

Get some shit stabilizers that start bending after a while.

my first bike was some little red and blue number with fat white tyres

Yes, I think mine was like that, I have a residual feeling of twee when I try an conjure up an image of it in my head. I felt like Noddy riding that thing.

My first bike was a pink banana-seat number, that's not really important. My second bike was a road bike, my parents made me save babysitting money for half the total, and I bought a teal Schwinn Sprint and all the coordinating accessories I could get my 13-year old hands on: bottles, toe clips, seat bag, gloves. I think the shop guys thought it was cute because they kept throwing stuff in the deal. I was the proudest kid ever.

A real bike! A serious one, for century rides and touring and STUFF! Of course I wanted to upgrade to a fancier Trek by a few years later, but I was loyal to the Sprint until college, when I moved to the "big city" and stopped riding.

PS: Someone brought a grey Sprint -- a tiny one, maybe 46-47cm?? -- into the bike shop last week, suicide brakes, foam bars, and all, and I'm kind of tempted to overhaul it....

It weighs a shocking amount, I'd forgotten how HEAVY it was....

They build kids' bikes out of scaffolding poles and girders and they make the components out of some sort of grey cheese I think. Laurel - did you do mega long rides when you were thirteen???

I used to do charity rides and tour with my dad and on summer camp when I was that age. First on a hevay as sin kids mountain bike, then on a Raleigh racer and then on an Evans tourer which was the best bike I ever owned until it was stolen.

I had a Raleigh wisp when I was about six or seven, and I still have the scar on my chin from when I catapulted myself over its handlebars going down our hilly gravel path with no brakes on (going down hills with no brakes on = mark of total hardness, never mind being able to do no-handers and wheelies). I thought it was the mostly beautiful bike I had ever seen and I think I actually cried when I went through to the sitting room on Christmas morning and saw it leaning against the fireplace. Except being a total tomboy I spent most of the time tootling around on my next door neighbour's BMX because my bike was too nice and had shit suspension for doing stupid things on, which was really the whole point of a bike when you are in primary school (see aforementioned chin-splitting incident).

I have a rickety old boneshaker now, which a bloke in a pub in Cambridge sold to me for a tenner. I also have a go of my brother-in-law's mountain bike on the rare day when it is sunny and I feel like doing something energetic rather than going to the pub.

There were a lot of kids on the Five Borough Bike thing earlier this year! And on little bikes, too. Maybe some didn't do the whole 50 miles but still, they were riding in close traffic w/ everyone else.

I did a couple of centuries with my dad, but he usu did the whole hundred miles and I did two loops ie the metric version (100km). And then a week-long ride from mid-Michigan to Bloomington, IN for a church thing in '91, I would have been...15? Now I miss long country roads w/o stoplights.

I was gonna ask, where can you get reasonably rural close to NYC for some nice country riding? Hudson valley, Conneticut, Jersey shore, Long Island?

Ed, my mother's childhood bike was a blue Evans and she said it never occurred to her that it was MASSIVELY heavy: it was a bike. And she rode it places. :D Like tanks, they are.

FW Evans, as in from the bike shop that used to be just on the Cut behind waterloo station and now is a massive chain selling nothing out of the ordinary at all,

(Mine was a lovely sparkly green one with 531 tubing 105 brake levers, Deore LX eveything else, bar end shifter, brooks b17 saddle, a thing of pure beauty)

Ailsa: never underestimate the face-brake when all else fails to slow you down!

Ed & Laurel: you'se twos is tough kids for sure.

my first bike was a red raleigh apple, SO SO CUTE, i just did a quick gis but found no pics. i think i was about 6. my bro got one the same christmas, i think his was prob some kind of bmx type bike. it took me FOREVER to learn to ride without stabilisers... we had a back lane behind our row of terraced houses but it had a significant (maybe not really, but to my overimaginative brain it was) camber and i was convinced i would fall off into the road and scrape all my skin off (weird, this was never a prob with anything else i did, hanging upside down from monkey bars or trees or whatever). as a result i over-compensated and fell into the nettles repeatedly. smart move. once i got it though, i really got it, and was able to do stuff i could never do now, like rideasfastasicould then climb up on to the top tube and stand on it. thinking back, this bike was probably the Best. Present. Ever, though i didn't realise it at the time.

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r299/crunchydog_2006/budgie.jpg
The Budgie, 1979

was able to do stuff i could never do now, like rideasfastasicould then climb up on to the top tube and stand on it

This sounds bonkers and awesome. I can't decide whether I didn't try this move cos I didn't have the balls or whether it's cos I did have balls. (My riding pal showed me a picture of him as a teenager standing upright on his top-tube with his arms out for balance and his bike just resting on one pedal. Dunno how he got up there, but I suspect devilry is afoot)

x-post: nice picture!

yeah, it kind of baffles me now as to how i did it, but i did it to death up and down the road my friend bethan lived on, like for hours at a time. i can get my head around how i got up there, but down??

Yes, it would be the down bit that would bother me!

Age 14 I was pretty tall I was riding across southwest ireland and stopping at pubs for pints of Guinness, sleeping in barns and singing round peat fires, happy days.

My bikes were:

Raleigh 11
Raleigh 14
Racer

Never had a Chopper or Grifter. I'm surprised the Raleigh 14 is fairly forgotten. Every kid on my estate had one, whether male or female. They had small wheels but where great for skids and jumping kerbs. And really tough with it. They were also quite tricky for "no hands" (though not as tricky as a Chopper) so you got kudos if you could do it.

http://www.retropedalcars.com/images/Marx-Big-Wheel.jpg

I had a red Raleigh with stabilisers, on which I learned to ride. I don't remember much else about it, but I do remember my second bike, a Puch Minisprint. I thought it was the bee's knees and I'd ride around in my cap pretending I was in the Tour de France. After that I had a green shopper built by a friend of my great-great-uncle Gil in Oxford which had three gears and wheels so small I could have ridden up the Matterhorn without getting out of my seat.

When I was about 15 I got another Raleigh for Christmas (or was it birthday?), a white girlie racer with really narrow wheels and five gears. It was a silly bike, really, and I made it look even sillier by riding it in a pencil skirt. I had two accidents on it. The first happened when I was barged off the road by a lorry in the pouring rain (I tried to hop up onto the pavement and didn't quite make it, so skidded along on my thigh and knee for a few yards). The other accident was entirely my fault: I decided to ride down some shallowish steps in Woking Park, didn't get the turn in at the bottom and landed in a bush.

4-6 Raleigh elf (blue complete with stabilisers - which came off after about a month)
6-9 Raleigh Tomahawk (fake chopper with no gears - amazing for wheelies)
9-12 Raleigh Grifter XL - shed of a bike, had a rear rack which came off quicly, also put red mags on it
11-13 Kuwahara bmx - chrome with all blue trimmings - amazing bike, was great for jumping
13-16 Raleigh Arena racer