Originally Posted by
VegasTriker
You are a smart parent for buying a bike that fits your son right now, for not buying one he will eventually "grow into", and for selecting one based upon needs rather than what looks fancy. The gear range on this bike is 27 to 62 gear inches if the crank is 170mm. It's probably not great for steep hills but for ordinary riding it should suffice. If your read how adults approach bike purchases, one item that shows up a lot is how bikes fit the individual. It is more fun and a lot safer to ride a bike that fits. I also chuckled at your response to the bike shop. Many buyers don't know how to assess the competence of the bike shop when it comes to assembling a new bike by checking it out carefully. You can read one person's story here:
http://www.bikeforums.net/general-cy...es-riding.html. It's rather shocking that a real bike shop (vs mass merchandiser) can do such a poor assembly job. I had a similar experience with a young boy who's father bought the bike at WalMart. It lasted about 2 miles into a 10 mile cycling merit badge ride before both pedals stripped the crank arms.
I must confess, we did not purchase this bike entirely for our son. Yes we bought the bike mostly for ourselves as
we love to ride and our youngest was to big for a tag a long or a trailer. Yes we selfishly bought our kid a bike, he wanted the one with a shock and motorcycle fenders. He got the XTC and now after the fact he loves the bike and love riding it. Does this make us bad parents? I do like what Islabikes has done but there bikes were just too far out of our price range. I know what you mean about the cycling merit badge issues having helped run the program for our local troop for the past four years. We required all the participants to bring there bikes in for the first few meetings so they could learn the bicycle maintenance part using there own bikes. Most if not all needed work anyway and when it was time for the actual rides we knew the bikes were safe for the road.