A few weeks ago, I was riding my fat bike near Lake Nokomis when I was surprised to see a guy pedaling toward me on a bike with no front wheel. As the rider drew closer, I realized that it actually did have a front wheel—it had four of them, in fact, and they were very small. Instead of a standard bike wheel, the front fork terminated in a rollerblade.
That bicycle was designed and built by Kyle Alviani, a Bloomington-based mechanical engineer who by day works as a product designer at Wolf Tooth Components/Otso Cycles in Burnsville. And the surprises don’t stop with the rollerblade; Alviani has developed a contraption that lets him swap out the wheels for an ice skate, and take the bike tearing around on the city’s frozen lakes.
“I just thought it would be funny!” Alviani says of his creation. “Figured it would give my friends and I a good laugh, and it did.”
The story of the hybrid bike/rollerblade/ice skate actually begins a few winters ago, when its inventor built a ski fork for his fat bike.
“It's not really a novel idea to use a ski instead of a front wheel, it's been done before, [and] there are even commercially available kits and bikes you can buy,” Alviani says. “But I thought it would be fun to make my own, and I thought the simplicity of a straight tube from the head tube all the way to the ground would look cool, so I tried it.”
Alviani used a 1-1/8" steel tube (that’s the same diameter as a normal bike steerer tube, for those of who don’t build frankenbikes in our spare time) that he attached to a pivot at the bottom so the ski could articulate over bumps or while turning. His friend Dave helped weld it up, and his friend Bobby suggested adding a motorcycle steering damper that keeps the ski level when it leaves the ground.
Then, a few weeks ago, Alivani heard that there were going to be ice bike races on Lake Harriet to coincide with the Art Shanty Projects. He figured, why not try to make it work with an ice skate blade? It was “super simple” to turn the ski fork into a rollerblade/ice skate fork: “All I did was unbolt the ski from the pivot and screw on a wooden ‘foot’ that I carved from a 2x4.”
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From there, he just pops the “foot” into either the rollerblade or the skate, laces up, and heads on his merry way. Alviani reports that while it does feel a little different than riding with a wheel, the ski, rollerblade, and ice skate all work “exceptionally well” as replacements for a front wheel.
“At slow speeds and making tight turns is where it feels the most strange, but once you get going you get the feel for it pretty quickly,” he says. The skate was great on the ice; even when he leaned the bike way over to make aggressive turns, it didn’t slide out. (A studded rear tire helped keep traction in the back.)
“Seeing a project through from an idea to a finished product out in the world is a really cool feeling,” Alviani says, adding that working for Wolf Tooth/Otso is a dream job. “I love tinkering with bikes so much that it's still what I want to do when I get home from work… It's nice to have a creative outlet outside of work where I can just make stuff for the enjoyment of experimentation.”
And as for the bike’s Art Shanty race performance? Alviani took the bike-rollerblade on a group ride from Angry Catfish to the B-icicle race on Harriet—where he swapped it out for the skate—and reports that the other riders and the spectators got a kick out of it.
“I didn't win, but I was there to have a good time,” he says.
