Cycles for Children
Never Second best...
Our Special Children's Bikes - As with all our equipment we try to give you the very same quality of gear as we've used ourselves. One of the most challenging parts of this is in the area of children's bikes.
A typical child's bike will be immensely heavy, usually have useless suspension and both gears and brakes that require the strength of an adult to operate.
At Breton Bikes one solution has been to have a few of our adult bikes made specially small so that they will fit a child down to about 4'4”. This has worked well but of course for anyone smaller than this we're stuck.
But in 2015 Dawes (who supply our tandems) introduced a new range of quality children's bikes. This 'Academy' range use very light, triple-butted Aluminium frames and similar equipment to the well known Islabikes and have proved immensely popular.
All this range of bikes use Shimano gearing but do not use a triple chainset – rather relying on a wide-spaced cassette at the rear to give all the gears needed. I totally agree with this choice – a front derailleur needed to operate a triple chainset has a heavy spring in it (needed to hoick the chain off the chainrings) and small hands simply don't have the strength to operate this. Almost all more expensive children's bikes will therefore be carrying around a triple chainset that they can't use...
These brilliant bikes come in three sizes
Dawes Academy 26”
Under 10 kgs and with 8 widely-spaced gears this bike is perfect for the average 8-10 year old. To the standard bike we add mudguards and a rear rack to make a proper small touring bike...
Dawes Academy 24
Identical in spec to the 26” but just a bit smaller and lighter. 7-9 year olds should be fine on this and we add mudguards of course.
Dawes Academy 20
The baby of the range but with just as high a specification as the larger bikes – a lovely little bike for 5 years-old and up and fitted with mudguards.
Of course as well as these as an option there are our child-back tandems and trailerbikes available – tough choice!
