How many problems am I likely to encounter if I fit a 29″ front wheel to a 26″ bike?

I realise I’ll be altering the geometry but careful choice of fork should minimise this. How likely an I to run into foot/wheel interface problems?

What else could go wrong?

Ta

nothing can go wrong if the forks are long enough.

Don’t try and use a suspension fork, or a 29er fork. Even a short 29er suspension fork with a 29in wheel in is so much longer than a 26in fork and wheel it’s not even funny.

Stick to a short 440mm rigid fork and you’ll be fine.

* Paging WCA, customer advice at till six, please *

works with some frames

it worked well on my inbred with a with an rc31 fork. i ended up flipping the bars over to drop the front a bit but no pix but you can see what i mean on the pic of the rig below the inbred

Whilst I usually agree with Brant, I have to say that on this my experience is different. I have a Voodoo Wanga which is designed around a 100mm (26″) fork. I used to run it with a Marzocchi Marathon XC at around 115mm travel. I swapped to a Tora 29er fork at 80mm long and it works brilliantly. When you ride it you are in the same position and it feels exactly the same except it rolls faster and you get over and round stuff you you didn’t expect to!

with regard to foot rub on the wheel, it only seems to happen at really slow speed (1-2mph) and is not really a problem. In singltrack the bigger wheel in front encourages you to lean the bike into the bends with a front wieghted carving action.

What’s the worst that can happen?
Reckon my scandal front end would go in the 456 without altering the geometry, haven’t been arsed to try it yet though.

lefty/ maverick should work fine

Damn – I was looking for an excuse to post a pic of my home-made 69er/96er.

I’ve been running a Love/hate for a while with a 29er front wheel. I managed to just get away with using a 425mm A/C rigid fork (A Salsa Cro-moto, which fitted the bigger wheel and a 2.35 Rampage tyre) I reckon that the shorter fork means that the angles aren’t effected much at all but you can definately feel a difference in front end grip ,I thought that cornering in-particular was really much better.

The steering can feel a little slow at very slow speeds, and I don’t know if “proper” 29ers have different angles to combat this. But on the whole I was pretty impressed with 96/69ing so I’m on the lookout for a nice “proper” big wheeler now.

As long as your tyres don’t hit the fork/frame and your feet don’t hit the front wheel you can’t do yourself much harm*

* well no more harm than you would normally 😉