Small fat ones apprently:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16345232

I bet the cables for the rear mech freeze up as will the brake cable, plus the wheels are too small to roll over any substantial bumps. Love the quote

“The back wheel is set back slightly further than a usual bike, so it has a lower centre of gravity. This will allow better climbing ability and it also makes it more stable.”

Should at least make the tyres of something you can eat, so when it stops working you can still survive while waiting to be rescued.

The specially-built Hanebrink “ice bike” took designers in Los Angeles three months to finish

Would you trust an Ice Bike designed in LA?

Because they are good with mud clearance 🙂

putting a big ring on a 40lb bike with wheels that size that’ll be towing 150lb of kit seems a bit, errm, optimistic.

I hope they test it before the attempt,

then replace the rear with a Alfine or Roloff hub and fit proper fat bike wheels, ditch the front sus and don’t bother with the wind tunnel test!

with a 20″ wheel it will be the small ring thats pretty much redundant, surely?
ive never towed 150lb on ice though, i could be wrong.

big_n_daft – Member
I hope they test it before the attempt,

they are already there.

edit

they have tried it on sand:

But she admits they haven’t taken the bike on snow or ice:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16161062

Aren’t trips to extreme environments all about full and proper preparation? What will they do if they discover the bike doesn’t work? Just leave it somewhere?

How about we put an expedition in to run alongside on fatbikes?

Can’t take that much planning based on what their planners have produced!!!

EDIT: Didn’t realise they were already there! Still at least it will make for an easy counter record – fastest to the south pole – if they are able to make it.

Day 1 of Challenge
4th January 2012 8.15pm
Today we finally set off at 09.55. It seems like an odd time, but we couldn’t find our flags to mark out the start line!

Everyone has been saying it’s going to be impossible to ride the bikes here but I was determined to make them work – and they did! Unfortunately, they don’t go as fast as I’d like and it’s very tiring pedalling in the snow. We’ve set ourselves a daily target of 25 miles, but after 15 we decided to stop for the night.

Kites and blisters
5th January 2012 8.40am
I know we’re behind, but today we’re going to kite and Nikas reckons with the wind and the terrain we’re on, we could kite 40-50 miles in one day, meaning we’d be back on schedule.

Looks like they have dumped the bikes.

Someone who knows something about cycling in snow:

http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2012/01/south-pole-on-bike.html

First person to cycle to the South Pole.
First person to pogo-stick to the South Pole.
First person to walk to the South Pole while juggling.
First person to walk to the South Pole while juggling live piranhas.
First person to…

That sounds to me more like the voice of a woman who is a bit pissed that someone got to do it before her.

I suspect there has been a certain amount of thought put into this and since a very similar bike has already done nearly half the distance and she’ll have a lot of support it’s probably going to be fine.

I plan to be the first person to circumnavigate the Sargasso Sea by bike. I can’t see any major problems.

look out for eels!

Fair bit of pushing I’ll be involved…

Fair bit of pushing I’ll be involved…

is she a member of STW? 😉

OH NO! Avid brakes! She’ll NEVER make it!!

That sounds to me more like the voice of a woman who is a bit pissed that someone got to do it before her.

Women squabbling over a pole, down south?

That sounds to me more like the voice of a woman who is a bit pissed that someone got to do it before her.

+1

She sounds like a total cow

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the original blog post (it’s more insightful than most of the similar threads that have popped up here), but the ‘other Jill’, in the comments, is hilarious. Whinging about tweeting and the live-diary not being ‘authentic’, and then whinging about her friends, who rode some random trail in the ass-end of nowhere (I’m sure it was tough/extreme/gnarr/I-couldn’t-do-it-personally/whatever), not getting any media-coverage. Trips like this might require all kinds of planning and preparation, but so does getting it noticed (if that’s what you even want). Then the: “I’m not blaming [Helen] for being pretty, but…”.

I think a 1mph when the bikes were in use at Antartica counts as a fail.

“Today Niklas and I tried the ice bike for the first time. Towing our sledges behind the bikes was very hard. We went 1.5 miles in about 1.5 hours.

28th Dec entry at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/diaries/helen-skeltons-polar-challenge-for-sport-relief/pg/1

Later on they try the bikes again and do 15 miles in a day. Are bikes not supposed to be faster than walking?

OH NO! Avid brakes!

and the levers aren’t even speed dial versions 🙄