boomcatt

Hi, folks. New to the forum - and a beginner to biking. I'll be hoping to glean some pointers from y'all to bring home to the family, as myself, my wife and our two kids (ages 8 and 5) are just starting to get into biking together.

Thanks!
Lew

Viich

Get a lighter one - not much of a silver bullet for upgrades. Many kids' bikes have heavy, lower quality steel frames, heavy but cheap one piece cranks, etc. The frame is made for those cranks, a 3 piece won't fit without a heavy adaptor.

The spawn cycles bikes look awesome, but are a significant expenditure. The specialized hotrock is decent, and there are others that are a big step up from most of the Walmart/ Canadian Tire bikes. My little guys have a hotrock 16 and a Giant Modo 20" BMX style.

Maelochs

I'd say the best bet and possibly most important thing would be to keep it simple. Most children aren't going to be riding such that they really need full suspension, and as far as I know there aren't any kids' bikes that Really offer suspension ... just expensive, underbuilt bits and pieces that look like suspension.

If the only way to please the kids is to buy them overweight pseudo-suspension junk, go ahead ... they will need new bikes next year anyway, likely. But if you can convince them to ride normal bikes, in the end they would probably have just as much fun and actually More capacity to beat up the bikes---because the steel won't bend where the fake, mostly plastic pseudo-suspension bits would break.

I know lots of kids spent lots of decades beating the crap out of their rigid steel-framed Murrays, and Huffys and Sturmey Archers or whatever, jumping and crashing, jumping off and crashing, riding trails and tarmac and lawns and over curbs and Never did I see one of those bikes break. Kids today can't be doing anything more radical than all that, and those fake-suspension bikes certainly aren't any stronger.

As you can see I know nothing about children and not much about bikes, sorry.

DorkDisk

Just wait six months and your child will outgrow the bike

Darth Lefty 

@boomcatt

Strange edits in this thread. I'd wanted to respond but had to leave, finally made it back. I recall the bike in the OP before the edit was a 2000-ish vintage Hotrock. If so there are a couple of inexpensive and high-payoff changes you can make if you are normally handy with mechanic tools. The handlebars and stem are steel and can be replaced with aluminum. The seat post might be, too, and even if it's aluminum you can surely find a lighter one.

Anything beyond that becomes a project, though. The components are inexpensive and heavy but not junk, they should work fine unless they are worn out or rusted up, and finding lightweight parts in kids sizes costs a premium.

boomcatt

Hi, thanks for the advice -- and sorry for the weird edits on this post. After posting the original post, i realized that the "introductions" forum is not meant as the place to seek advice, so I moved the OP to the "Mountain Bikes" thread.

SkyDog75

My daughter rode a '98 Hotrock 24 around for a couple of years. I believe the handlebar was aluminum. The seatpost definitely was. The crankset had aluminum arms but steel chainrings. You could potentially save a pound or two by swapping out all the replaceable parts, but you'd wind up spending as much on upgrades as you would on another used bike and it's still gonna be heavy. That frame's a tank.

But my daughter loved that tank just like I loved my first Huffy BMX bike when I was a kid. She didn't know it was heavier than nice adult bikes.