- Some years back,
I bought a Mongoose Dolomite fat bike from Walmart.
I needed something I could pedal in the sand
to attempt to surf the tsunami
created by the displacement of a cruise ship leaving port.
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That didn't end up working out so well,
and I was left with a bike that was kind of out of warranty.
And so I gave it to this guy Raven,
who turned it into a tall bike.
Now some people call these double-decker bikes because,
oftentimes, you build them out of two bikes
welded on top of one another.
If you've never had the experience of riding a tall bike,
you would be surprised how fun it is.
But while I do love tall bikes,
and I do have a little bit of experience riding them,
I've never built one myself.
And so we have two bikes here today
that we're gonna butcher.
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And so, let's rip these bikes apart
and see if we can build a tall bike by the end of the week.
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There's lot's of different ways we can build this,
but the way I'm gonna do it
is run a chain down to the bottom bike.
And so this bottom bracket
is gonna have to be right over here.
I'm gonna extend the steerer tube like that.
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I'm as surprised as you are. They fit together.
So now I have to clean the paint off of the frames
where they're gonna get welded, line them up,
and this is where I can really screw up
because if the angle's wrong,
the bearings and the headset are not really gonna be right.
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It should stay straight.
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Before we get to even building the bike,
I have to get the steering working.
This is an old style threaded steerer tube.
And so you have threads up here,
and the length of it is very crucial.
And so I have to try and extend this tube
all the way through and make sure it's steers.
Once we've got all that figured out,
we can take it back apart, paint it,
and then start building a bike.
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Yeah, we can probably work with that.
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How did that get so long?
I cannot stress enough how much this is not a tutorial.
So the next step is clean up this frame really, really well.
Pull off all the stickers, sand it down and prime it
so we can paint it, and then we can build ourselves a bike.
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I've been prepping this frame for way too long.
It's time to just paint it and make it work.
If I had all week, I would just, yeah.
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Last night I woke up in a cold sweat,
and all I could think about was,
will the lower headset cup fit over the steerer tube?
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I think I found something.
I was just looking around the shop,
and I have this piece of pipe here
that's not light, actually.
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Not quite there.
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Oh, yeah.
Just where we want it.
So before we install the fork,
we gotta press in these here headset cups.
Only, my press is not long enough,
so we're gonna do it BMX style.
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Ooh, that's cutting it close.
Now for the complicated part, the drivetrain.
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I'm gonna install both cranksets
and run a chain from the top bottom bracket
down to the bottom one.
And then another one to the drivetrain.
I think it's gonna look cool. I think it's gonna work great.
And we should have really good shifting.
Herein lies the reason
why we need the bottom bracket mounted chain tensioner.
We can adjust the length of the chain,
but it's never gonna be perfect.
It's always gonna flop around.
This particular chain tensioner
stays in place with pressure.
You just screw in the bottom bracket cup over it,
and now we're gonna tap it into place.
Yeah, this is not a high-performance bicycle.
I'm not too worried.
And that's perfect.
It's essentially gonna be a reduction gear.
It's gonna make the gearing of the bike lower,
and that's okay cause I'm not gonna go very fast.
We could change it in the future.
So now the beauty of this is we can just now
put a derailleur on the back at the bottom.
It just works like a normal bicycle.
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On the center chain ring,
this chain actually rubs on this chain,
so I'm gonna have to put this on the smallest ring
in order for this to work.
So this is gonna be a serious gear reduction.
Here I have a quill stem to threadless conversions
so that we have more options for stems and handlebars.
Now we're talking.
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Okay, So we got no breaks or gears yet,
but we can sort of test this.
I guess, I guess I can just...
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Oh, man, it feels so cool.
All right. So let's see.
All right. She works.
All right, let's turn this into a bike.
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One really long shift housing coming right up.
So as it turns out, the actual shifter cable
is more than long enough for this.
It's actually not that long of a distance.
Not much longer than just a big Enduro bike.
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Almost done. Needs four bottle cages.
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I wanna ride it, but I think first we need to stare at it.
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So I wanna get into some sketchy stuff with this bike,
but we've gotta ramp it up
because I don't know how strong it is.
I'm not known as like the world's greatest welder.
So let's start by just riding it around,
making sure everything works.
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It's easy. The brakes work nice.
It's maneuverable.
Look at the turning radius on this thing.
It just feels so cool being up this high.
Woo.
Okay, so the problem is when I try to pedal uphill,
it wheelies.
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Probably not gonna do any more of that.
So the reason this bike wants to loop out backwards
is because, look at the seat tube, how much it slants back.
I'm like almost over the center of the rear wheel.
And that's something to consider when building one of these.
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Always wanted to build a tall bike,
and I always wanted to do it myself.
There's any number of people
I could have reached out to with more tools and experience
that could have helped me get this right on the first shot,
but the mistakes and the learning experiences
were too tantalizing.
And so, I committed to doing this all by myself.
To get this on the first shot, I'm pretty satisfied.
For all you fabricators out there,
I apologize for the confusion and pain,
and sorrow that you experienced while watching me do this,
but I had fun.
I hope you learned something today, and if not,
I hope you at least found it entertaining.
Thanks for riding with me today, and I'll see you next time.
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