• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

bikes for kid's?

Nordic

Nordic

Husqvarna
A Class
Now that I am back in the dirt after 30 years, my kids (11 & 13) are eager. We borrowed a 50cc Honda with auto-clutch, but it is too small. Does anyone have any recommendations for bikes? We will be looking for us, and just one to share for starters anyway. I like the auto-clutch for the first bike, but something taller and in the 80 - 100cc category would be better for them. They are not headed down the mx racing road, but do want to ride trails and track.

Thanks cor your thoughts. Too bad that Husky does not make smaller rides......
 
Kawasaki KLX 110 is a great bike with a huge aftermarket, so a guy can keep riding as he gets older..... TTR 125 & CRF 150 are great entry level bikes with larger frames. My 9 year old is loving a 2008 KTM XC-65 at the moment. Not popular here, but KTM has a nice assortment of 2 strokes from 50cc & up.
 
Last year my 9 year old son got a 2002 Honda XR70 (with the big bore kit, so it has a bit more power) This has been a super trail bike, absolutely bulletproof, almost daily ramming around and repeated jumps and occasional run-ins with trees and logs. We've done some family enduros and he kept up on both the fast and technical sections. He even races it in our local supercross series in the "trail" class. My son is one of those kids that puts alot of "wear & tear" on his toys and this bike passed the test. The only drawback is the weight, not sure what it actually is, but it is unbelievably heavy for a little bike.
 
I think trials bikes are the way to go. They will learn the technical side of riding before the high speed + they will learn it all in the standing position which will serve them well in the future.
 
SSR has a 110 and a 125 semi mini bike. The 110 has 12" front wheels, 10" rear and the 125 has 14" front and 12" rear. seat hight on the 110 is about 28" and the 125 is almost 30" price for 110 is around $650.00 and the 125 is around $800.00. With SSR the chains are not the greatest, Change the oil from the gitgo and change it again after 30 min or so, and check the nuts and bolts after the first couple of times. Most of the Chinese bikes have come a long ways from 5 years ago. SSR also came out with a 250 watercooled dirt bike. Looks like a Honda CRX25) frame with a KTM style motor retailing $3599.00. SSR has Jeff Willow testing it on there facebook page.
Hodaka Bob
County Line Cycles Grovertown, IN.
 
Kawasaki KLX 140/140l. Aluminum frame. Front and rear disk brakes. Electric start. Rear reservoir shock. Light weight.
 
Honda XR 80, XR 100. Teach em to kickstart and use a clutch and they are very easy bikes to ride, find, maintain, and sell. At the ages your kids are at, they'll outgrow everything very quickly.
 
Thanks to all who responded a while back on this topic. After some search, I tracked down one of the very few 20" Oset bikes in the US and took the plunge. This thing is fantastic! It is highly adjustable and can accommodate my 10 year old daughter as well as myself at 6'2". The power range is surprising and it will easily wheelie with my 175lbs aboard on higher settings, yet provide safe control for her on lower settings. Best of all, it is silent and this allows the kids to ride anytime they wish without pissing off the neighbors. No need to wait for me to trailer the bike here or there on a weekend. No exhaust, no hot pipes. The lack of gas makes it easy to pop in the back of a car with seats folded down.

I short, we are thrilled with the bike and the kids are already learning some basic trials skills.

Thanks again!
 
Cool looking little bike and I'm sure your kids have a ball on it. If you don't mind saying how much did it set you back? How long will it run on a charge and what's the charging time?
 
It cost about the same as the Kawi and Honda bikes that we looked at, around 2,200. My son was riding it at 6:30am before school and then both kids (and me) played this afternoon. I would estimate that on middle range power settings, we are getting about 3hrs to a charge. We ran it pretty far down and is now on the charger. The documentation says that healthy batteries will never need more than 5hrs. I will let you know. It has a switch to set the max. speed and we have been running slow, which is fast enough for any technical riding. There is a potentiometer to control throttle response, from gradual to snap. Between the two! it incredibly tunable.
 
I realize that in my enthusiasm, I have not really mentioned the potential downsides o the Oset. One is that the bike has no gears or clutch and so the kids will not gain those skills. Also, both front and rear brakes are discs operated with hand levers, and so they do not learn the foot brake. The lack of a seat forces them to stand all the time, which may or may not be an asset, depending on your perspective. For us, these are far outweighed by their being able to ride whenever, and more or less wherever they wish. There will hopefully come a day when they move on to more typical rides and learn these other skills. I am hopeful that that they Oset will teach them some good fundamentals and that they will see how fun our sport can be. It is fun to see them already doing track stands, small wheelies, hopping the front end and popping over small obstacles.
 
Scott Frey said:
Boogie, thanks again for introducing us to these Oset bikes!
Click to expand...

No problem. I think they're an awesome idea and I'm waiting for the day they make an adult sized bike... so I can get one!

Although they don't have the same controls as a normal bike (brakes, clutch, gears etc.) I'm sure the balance and control gained from standing 100% and riding more(!) will outweigh the downsides.

I hope you and your kids are having fun!
 
Thanks for the feedback Scott; much appreciated. Most kids start out on auto bikes anyway and they all seem to figure out the clutch and brake things later so I wouldn't sweat that. IMO riding a bike is the best teacher and the more time riding one the mo-better. Gear up the kids and let them have fun :cheers:.
 
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