Subject: Re: Frontwheel Drive Posted by: Robert on January 02, 1999 at 00:49:06: In Reply to: Frontwheel Drive posted by Thom See on December 28, 1998 at 15:21:59:

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.