#sn02

Everyone by now will have heard about or seen a fat bike.  Some people believe that their time in the sun is now at an end. We though don’t believe that and feel that everyone needs a fat bike in their quiver. In fact, a fat bike might make the perfect quiver killer. With a fat bike, you can get multiple bikes in one, which is a great way to justify the cost of buying a new one, especially a well thought out one like our ICAN models.

One of the things everyone assumes about fat bikes is that they are all about winter and crossing frozen tundra. They are undoubtedly good at this, given that fat bikes were originally created to cross Alaska during winter. They have thought far more utility and use than just this one condition, which is possibly why you think you don’t really need one.

Fat bikes can be ridden everywhere

You can use a fat bike as a go anywhere trail bike during summer. I have yet to find a comfy commuter. In fact, fat bikes are great for commuting you can bomb downstairs and then you can bomb right back up them. Riding a fat bike upstairs is worth it purely for the look of bemusement that crosses other commuters faces. You can use them to ride across the beach. You can even use them to go and pick up your shopping with and if you feel like doing so, you can use a fat bike to tour the world.

The other thing you might not realize is that you can do all of this at speed. As fat bikes have such wide and low pressured tires you’ll roll through rock gardens, sail off drops, ride over curbs, and possibly even cars. The fat bike is indeed the bike that can get you everywhere and anywhere.

As we said earlier you can even turn a fat bike into multiple bikes. Change your fat bike wheels for a set of narrower rimmed plus wheels and tires and you now have a trail destroyer. Your fat bike will already be fat but now you’ve just given it another little speed boost. You’ll be able to destroy your local trails rising the bike in this setup.

Bikepacking on a fat bike

Add some bags or racks and you have a perfect bikepacking machine. One of the most important requirements for a bikepacking bike is that it is comfortable. You’ll not want to cover vast distances on an uncomfortable bike. You’ll also not have an issue should the terrain become a bit rougher than you expected. You’ll just carry on rolling.

Then we have another characteristic of fat bikes that makes them great for bikepacking. Due to their wide tires, they have a load of grip and this will help you get up inclines where your standard adventure bike has already run out of traction. It might not be beautiful and it might not be pretty but they can help you climb like a mountain goat and when you're fully laden you don’t want to risk a spill when climbing due to losing traction.

Using a fat bike in summer

Not only will you be climbing in new terrain with a fat bike but you’ll also be able to explore areas that none of your other bikes can manage. A fat bike will be able to ride across the beach with ease, you won’t sink in the soft sand but you’ll float over the top. This also goes the same for boggy and swampy areas. Your bike will get you through areas where normally you’d have become a squelchy mess. Nothing beats a nice ride along the beach during the heat of summer.

An ICAN SN01 at the beach

As we hinted at when climbing it is hard for a fat bike to lose grip and crash. The ability to stay upright is something that many newcomers to mountain biking will appreciate. It is a great way to build your confidence knowing that your bike will help keep you the right way up as you fire through berms.

By now your probably thinking that you want a fat bike and after all who could blame you? Well, we offer a nice choice of fat bike frames to build into your dream fat bike.

The ICAN SN01 fat bike frame

The SN01 was our first fat bike frame and was a success. On various forums, you’ll be able to see people enthusing about their SN01. Some have had them from when the model was first released. It looks like they are planning on holding onto them forever. Which we feel is better praise than any 5-star magazine review.

The SN01 is constructed from Toray T700 carbon. This has allowed us to build a very light fat bike frame. An idea that many people can’t get their heads around, fat bikes don’t need to be heavy and made from steel.

The SN01 may be light, but it is still strong and stiff. You might not notice how stiff it is though thanks to running tires at 5 psi. It would be a great bikepacking rig and has room for you to get a great big frame bag in the front triangle.

As well as the ability to take a frame bag the SN01 has rack and fender mounts. So not only will you be able to go bikepacking but you’ll also be able to use the SN01 to get to work in comfort. As we have said fat bikes can be used all year round and have multiple uses.

The ICAN SN02 fat bike frame

The SNO2 Is a fat bike frame that looks like it wants to be a race bike. It looks fast, and it is fast. It would be a great choice if you wanted to get out and do some fat bike races. There is even a fat bike world championship if you fancy trying to become a world champ and the SN02 is the bike to get you there.

Like the SN01 the SN02 is constructed using Toray T700 carbon fiber. The T700 allows us to bring you a fat bike that is light as its racy looks imply. It is also stiff enough to make sure that your power gets to the back wheel. Your power goes through a 100 mm BSA shell. We choose a threaded bottom bracket to make sure that you have no issues if your out riding in an ultra-marathon event.

The ICAN SN04 fat bike frame

The SN04 is our full suspension fat bike. The SN04 sets new standards in comfort. If you find a standard rigid fat bike comfortable the 120 mm travel SN04 makes riding as smooth as silk. Look at the picture above the bike would hardly notice riding over those boulders.

The SN04 will make you a great trail rider. Rock gardens will no longer hold any fear for you. You’ll just lean back and roll through them. The bike will do all the hard work for you. With the suspension helping to keep your tires on the ground you’ll find no lack of grip with the SN04.

You’ll even notice this grip if you take it on an urban ride or use it for your commute to work. When at lights you’ll be able to track stand practically forever. The bike will keep you upright and not let you waver to the side and fall over, which always hurts your pride more than your body.

The SN04 like our other fat bike frames is constructed from Toray T700 carbon fiber. The carbon this time is built up to make sure that the frameset is stiff despite having a shock linkage built into it. We recommend a Rock Shox Monarch XX shock at the back and a 120mm Rock Shox Bluto out front.

The ICAN fat bike family

Our fat bike frame might only be 3 models big, but it is hard to see why it would need any more models. With our 3 models, we have covered all the fat bike bases. We have brought you high-end carbon fiber fat bike frames and done so at a very affordable price.

The use of carbon fiber allows our models to not only be useful during winter, but they can also be a great summer bike. As you won’t be carrying any excess weight around you’ll definitely find our bikes great for getting some foot out fast cornering actions during the summer. Fat bikes might have been designed initially for floating over snow, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hammer them down dry and dusty tracks in summer.

How many of us know someone that would always have gone faster if only they had been using that brand new thing that was in all the media. They would have been faster if they had fewer knobs on their tires. They would have been, but they forgot to lower their dropper.

There is always that one person who will have a range of excuses for why they were slower than everyone. It will never be themselves. What we want to know is, are they right or should we always follow the adage of a good workman never blames his tools?

So we decided to start with mountain bike descending. Will tires affect my descending speed or should I perhaps just lay off the brakes and ride downhill correctly?

Are Bigger Tires Better?

We have seen a steady stream of data coming in from road bikes that wider tires can be faster than old school narrow tires. It is a lot harder to quantify on mountain bikes though. Trails can change from one run to the next, but we can apply a little bit of research and see what happens.

Plus bikes tires (tires that are 2.8” to 3” wide) were billed as the best thing since sliced bread when they started to appear on the scene a few years ago. We were told that they rolled faster over rocky terrain as there was less tire deflection. They provided more grip, which was confidence inspiring on tight berms and corners.

The funny thing is that this is all true. All the marketing hyperbole for plus size tires was actually correct. The problem was people never really bought them. The issue seems to have been that many people felt they were cheating or they should only be on beginner’s bikes.

It was as if the plus size was too good for its own good.

New Tire Sizes

The world started to move on.

Manufacturers started to pay more attention to tires. We began to see tires that kept some of the features of plus tires but started to make them in minus size. We found that the manufacturers tried to keep the high volume, that is why you want wide rims and taller sidewalls.

The taller sidewalls were reinforced to add more stiffness to the tire casing, tires started to get rounder (yes, we used to ride tires with square profiles) and the knobs began to get more compliant.  This is what all the tire manufacturer’s marketing departments are telling us.

As this happened, we saw tires go from 3” to 2.8” to now 2.6”. 2.6” is now being paraded through all the media as the new size to jump on. According to the manufacturers, it offers all the benefits of plus-sized tires minus the squishy feeling of 2.8” or 3” tires.

The question though is this right or are we just being sold a new “standard”?

Testing the Width

The best way to find out is to go and ride tires on trails. As we said, it is hard to quantify the data in the same way as we can with road bike tires. The way forward is to take a lot of runs and average out the data and see what happens.

When you get out and test a 2.6” tire against a 2.8” tire one of the first things you might notice is that the 2.8” will let you away with more mistakes. It also feels more stable, so you tend to leave braking a little bit later. This is especially true when the trail gets a little bit loose. The wider tire will find more to grip into and propel you onwards, whereas with the 2.6” tire you might feel more likely to dab and lose time.

There is a simple way to test this hypothesis. Put your wheels and tires on the same bike and perform a roll down test. A roll-down test is exactly what it sounds like, and you roll your bike down a hill and time between two markers, you are not allowed to pedal or brake doing this, you will also want to take the same seating position.

We took various runs and found the 2.8” tires to be faster, roughly a second faster over a 200m roll. We then went back to school and used some statistics training. We wanted to make sure that this extra time was due to the tires and not due to something out with our testing.

When we use statistics we want to work out a P-value, apologies if you’ve had to study statistics and just had flashbacks to the lessons. A P-value allows us to work out how statistics to work out significant a result is.

How Fast are Plus Tires?

Your P-value will come out as a number between 0 and 1. You need a result of under 0.05 for a null hypothesis. In the real world, we call this under 5%. The hypothesis in our test is that the tires make no difference to speed. So if we have a lower than 5% result, then we can say that the tires made a difference.

In our roll down tests, we found that the 2.8” tires rolled down our course faster and more importantly the P-value for our results worked out at 2%. What this stills us is that the tires made a difference. If the number had been above 5%, the tires would have made no difference to the time.

For instance, if the P-value had come back at 6%, we would have assumed that there could have been 6% chance of a difference in speed even if the tires did not affect the outcome. The fact that we get such a low P-value means that it is highly likely that the tires made this difference.

We then decide to see what happens if we compared these tires to a more standard 2.35” tire. What we found was that the 2.35” was almost the same speed as the 2.6” and slower than the 2.8” tire.  So for us, the 2.8” tire is still a tire that you want to be shod on your bike if you want speed.