Subject: Re: Frontwheel Drive Posted by: E. Wilkosz on May 28, 1999 at 07:54:35: In Reply to: Re: Frontwheel Drive posted by Robert on January 02, 1999 at 00:49:06:

Message: >>I'm curious to find out about any brands of experimental frontwheel drive mountain bikes. Do they exists? >>Any info would be appreciated. Thanks. >There are no front wheel only drive bicycles that I know of, except for a few recumbents. On conventional bikes, front wheel drive only will not work well because most of the time, when you are seated, 60%-75% of the weight is on the rear wheel and there is no functionally efficient way to attach a normal chain to the front, it would have to go through a lot of power robbing components to be able to make this happen. I do know of a two wheel drive setup for mountain bikes that is available, and there may be others I haven't seen. Here is the URL for Spicer Industries that makes the two wheel drive setup: http://www.evansville.net/~gene/. While I know first hand how nice two wheel drive would be on a mountain bike, especially for climbing hills, the Spicer system does not appear to be all that smooth. It uses a drive cable to drive the front off of the rear which probably adds 5 to 10 pounds to the bike, they don't have any weights listed so I can't be sure. Other disadvantages this system has is from what I >can tell the driving gears are external, so they would probably get easily gunked up and absorb power, it is real ugly and is real expensive. As you probably know there are several hand crank tricyles and several hand crank recumbents. There is even a push-pull bike in France that could crank a front wheel. The was a company in St. Louis that tried to market a two wheel drive bike but it had business difficulty. I would like to develop a two-wheel drive bike that used a conventional foot crank and a front hand crank. Since Cannondale has now developed a front fork that uses one arm only it may be possible to put a crank on the handle bar area of an almost traditional style bicycle.