Part 1: Building a Kids 20inch Full Suspension MTB
So my kids are enjoying MTB’ing a lot and especially a bit of downhill. I notice all lower priced Kids MTB come with heavy spring front suspension and v-brakes. Anything with disc brakes and air suspension was very expensive and full suspension was over £1.2k (for a kids bike!).
So I though how hard could it be to build one…..
Issue 1 – Find a suitable bike as a basis
I could only find 3 types of bikes that fitted the basis for a full suspension build:
- Spike Osprey (pretty old skool looking bike but did come with disc brakes as standard)
- Scott Spark Jr (pretty rare, never saw one appear on the usual 2nd hand websites)
- Carrera Detonate (grey) + Carrera Sol (pink) (aluminium frame, come up for sale at a reasonable cost).
So I bought a £20 Carrera Sol in pink that wasn’t working:
But a bit of cleaning and tweeking with the brakes and it worked. Daughter liked it, but wow oh so heavy.
Issue 2 – Front Air Suspension fork for 20” bikes
Now I knew this was going to be a problem as looking at the more expensive bikes they seemed to build their own custom suspension components.
However I found 2 companies that did make a 20” front Air Suspension fork:
I tried to order a SR Suntour from US, they only had 1 in stock and was a reasonable price after a load of online discounts at $120 (£90) however they wanted nearly £55 postage (without including UK import tax).
So I tried searching for Spinner, but no stockists in UK. On the Spinner website they did list a dealer in Poland called bluepill.pl so I sent over an email and had a nice reply from Lukasz Nowak at the company. Sadly, he had none available for a couple of months…..
Issue 3 – 20” wheels with disc rotor mounts
There seemed to be loads of 20” kids bikes running either hydraulic or cable disc brakes e.g.
- Cannondale Cujo 20
- Specialized RipRock 20
- Trek Roscoe 20
- Norco Fluid 2.3 HT Plus
- MARIN Hidden Canyon 20 2019
- CUBE Acid 200 Disc
- Orbea MX 20 Disc
- Kona Honzo 2-0
So I thought it can’t be difficult surely? Well it seems it was, I only found 2 places where I could get 20” wheels with disc brake rotors:
Taylor Wheels (but none in stock)
WheelsOn via ebay
So I had the bike and couldn’t get the air suspension yet so I decided to take apart the £20 bike and see what I could salvage for the build….
