Joined
·
867 Posts
One of my other hobbies used to be scale modeling airplanes. At a flea market I saw a little bicycle decoration made out of wire, that was just a decoration, but it was built to scale, and looked like a little city bike, and I thought it was cute, so the evil thought occurred to me, what about building a scale model that actually works, whether or not anyone could ride it.
I've built a bunch of bikes (8 total) for my kids, and scaled them down as much as possible. So for functional reasons I'm already doing the scale-down thing when it comes to handlebars (1/2 and 5/8 tubing), hubs (45mm OLN - 110OLN), cranks (40mm wide BB's), and sometimes custom pedals, but otherwise I never tried to make them LOOK to scale, and I used standard parts wherever humanly possible (1" headsets, off-the-shelf brakes, etc.) so they can look a bit whacky, but who cares about looks? But I just kept thinking about it....
A 60% scale model would be a 16er, that means either 305 or 349. I was able to find rims and tires on eBay for both sizes and decided to go with the 305. Unfortunately the rims are red, and the 32m tires are much fatter than I wanted, but if anyone else can find 25-305 tires anywhere in the world, I would be really happy to hear about it. There's nothing I can do about the fat tires so it's going to look a bit balloon-tired...
Next problem: figure out how to make scaled-down headset, cranks, chain? and brakes...
I've built a bunch of bikes (8 total) for my kids, and scaled them down as much as possible. So for functional reasons I'm already doing the scale-down thing when it comes to handlebars (1/2 and 5/8 tubing), hubs (45mm OLN - 110OLN), cranks (40mm wide BB's), and sometimes custom pedals, but otherwise I never tried to make them LOOK to scale, and I used standard parts wherever humanly possible (1" headsets, off-the-shelf brakes, etc.) so they can look a bit whacky, but who cares about looks? But I just kept thinking about it....
A 60% scale model would be a 16er, that means either 305 or 349. I was able to find rims and tires on eBay for both sizes and decided to go with the 305. Unfortunately the rims are red, and the 32m tires are much fatter than I wanted, but if anyone else can find 25-305 tires anywhere in the world, I would be really happy to hear about it. There's nothing I can do about the fat tires so it's going to look a bit balloon-tired...
Next problem: figure out how to make scaled-down headset, cranks, chain? and brakes...