It may be summer here, but that means winter in New Zealand which, on the South Island at least, means snow. What to do with that old hardtail frame? Put skis on it of course! At least, that’s exactly what New Zealander Julian Goulding did on a weekend recently:
If you only want to see people riding it, rather than the build, skip to just after the six minute mark.
The design has some kinks to work out, and they do eventually break a ski, but if you have an angle grinder and a stick welder, it’s a really simple design. If it keeps raining the way it has been in Yorkshire (*looks out of window* yep!), we’ll probably have enough mud to use one of these soon too.
Check out Julian’s YouTube channel and you’ll see he’s currently building a bike shop and cafe out of a 40 foot shipping container. Plenty in that for anyone who likes to watch stuff getting ground, cut and welded.
Not actually designed to run on this surface. You’d need skis made of something with a negative friction coefficient to do that… or perhaps instead something designed to turn or roll? What an idea!
David started mountain biking in the 90’s, by which he means “Ineptly jumping a Saracen Kili Racer off anything available in a nearby industrial estate”. After growing up and living in some extremely flat places, David moved to Yorkshire specifically for the mountain biking. This felt like a horrible mistake at first, because the hills are so steep, but you get used to them pretty quickly.
Previously, David trifled with road and BMX, but mountain bikes always won. He’s most at peace battering down a rough trail, quietly fixing everything that does to a bike, or trying to figure out if that one click of compression damping has made things marginally better or worse. The inept jumping continues to this day.
