I can recall riding the Large Marge rim prototypes last winter through some snow and thinking, we need bigger tires and a bigger frame to ride through this stuff. Since the 1x1 I was on only fit a 3.0" tire up front and a 2.7" on the rear, these were the limits in which we tried to ride with. When I got to work the following monday, Brother David Sunshine shared the exact same thoughts. Bigger would be better.
Just to let you all know what we"ve been working on and inform you that we, at Surly, have all gone off the deep edge, this is our very first sneak peak of the prototype frameset we snappily call, Pugsley. It has tire clearance for 4" tires, which we"re also working on. Pictured here with the Large Marge rim with a Nokian Gazzaloddi 3.0" tire and there is plenty of clearance for something with more girth.
In order to get that much tire clearance, we had to use a 100mm wide bottom bracket shell. But since this created poor chainlines issues, we offset the rear hub 17.5mm to match up the front and rear chainlines. The other thing odd about this bike is the matching 135mm spaced offset fork. This allows you to interchange front and rear wheels for gear changes on singlespeeds or if your freewheel/freehub froze up. We are going to make 17.5mm offset adapters for wheelbuilding ease as well.
What"s the point? The point is, bigger tires float over stuff, allow you to ride lower pressures and achieve major traction through soft things like snow, sand, loose gravel, downed branches, ball crawls, little brothers, or whatever gets in your way. We plan to get rideable samples in the near future and test them this winter on the snow and ice.
When will it be available and how much will it cost you ask? We have no idea at this point. At the very soonest, we"ll have framesets available next summer. We expect it to be the most expensive Surly in our line up due to all the weird shaped tube bending tooling and jig fixturing equipment we need to buy. It"ll be available in 16", 18" and 20" sizes. The color is not definite, although the metallic Barney purple is growing on us.
I know what you"re saying: "where is the motor?" "how much does it weigh?" "that"s the most stoopid thing I"ve seen since 3.0 standard headsets". Well, you are the motor, it weighs .017310 tons, and it"s only stoopid in a good way.
This is what happens when you live in a climate with 5 months of winter and alot of frozen lakes. Hopefully more photos will surface on the internet after the Interbike tradeshow next week.
