Fat Bikes, Through Axles & BoB

 The first Fat Bike was ridden in the Sahara from Zinder to Tamanrasset in 1980 by Jean Naud. Using Michelin prototype tyres his journey is recorded in his book Trois Rous Pour Timbouctou. If anybody knows of an English translation of this book please let me know. The fat bike we know today sees its' roots in Alaska and New Mexico between Simon Rakower of All Weather Sports in Fairbanks Alaska and Ray Molina in New Mexico. Ray wanted them for his guided desert tour business. Simon's interest came from being involved in the tech support for the then Iditabike Race across the snows of Alaska. Mainstream availability comes in 2005 with the emergence of the Surly Pugsley frame. Since then we have seen most major brands bring a Fat Bike to the market and tyres appear in standard catalogues.

The history of the Thru Axle has yet it appears to be written, even in the Wiki Book of Lies. A far from extensive search discovered two patents raised in 2006 & 2008 neither from a major manufacturer. The RockShox Psylo has been around since 2001/2 so I can't really illuminate much here. Fair to say the various specs are established in the MTB world, rapidly arriving in CX therefore road thru axles are only a matter of time. Ben Delaney's article in BikeRadar points to the age old saw that the manufacturers want a standard system to allow customer choice. Historically in my experience this ends up with a number of differing standards. (Think BB30)

Where does all this fit in with us here at Amba? Well fairly regularly we get asked if there is a way to fit a Bob trailer to a bike with a rear thru axle. Until late last year the answer had always been no. I then fell across the Robert Axle Project and I finally had an answer. I followed them on Twitter to see what they were up to and was pleasantly surprised with a follow back and an email to the office asking if we'd like to distribute in the UK. Sadly this is too niche even for us so we declined the offer but the thru axle brigade have a BoB trailer attachment solution.

Fat bikes reared their head this week with a customer wanting to tow his BoB with his Surly Moonlander 29er with 5” tyres. Unsurprisingly this is all too much for the 28” fork version of the BoB trailers. A short web search threw this answer up on the MTBR forums. A neatly engineered solution. Further down the thread is a link to Coastkid's blog from 2011 where he has radically modified a BoB to work with his fatbike.

Two solutions for the dedicated fatbike rider in a week and one for the thru axle crowd I thought that was worth putting fingers to keyboard.