I have often wondered why bikes have the size wheels they do. To test this idea I built up a cruiser for my friend Owen, in exchange for some graphic design work on a bike logo. To my shock, his design was almost identical to the bike I built him, and we never compared notes in advance! Here is his logo:
It isn’t too hard to imagine his bike, which is a cruiser (Huffy USA) with a 700c x 23cm front wheel and a kids 24” rear wheel with a coaster break. To cite all sources, I actually got the idea from a youth I was mentoring at the Durham Bike Co-op. His low-rider was a simple replacement of the mountain bike rear wheel with a much smaller children’s coaster wheel. Both his and mine my young friends rear wheel conversion bikes were slow as hell, hard to turn at low speeds, and gave lots of opportunities for pedal strikes (which some revel). But, if you got the seat low enough, and put some high flange handlebars on you felt pretty cool. Anyway, if the bike went too fast then how would you get people checking you out.
Owen is in the process of repainting the bike gold, and I look forward to posting pictures when his paint job is complete. It could look pretty rad, as Owen is an artist using spray paint as his medium. I reserve the term graffiti artist, because it is more realism than anything else.
