John Sowerby sent me a story about “the most expensive – impractical bike we could build”, so here it is.

“Well we have a big MTB demo day at my work [wheelbase] every year and Andy Mee [Kona rep] brought this Shred 2.0 [20″ kid’s bike] and as you can expect it took us practically no time to skid the crap out of it. So my mate Nick told Andy to let us know when he was finished with it and we’d buy it off him at the end of the season just to play about on.”

We got it at the tail end of last year and promptly swapped the bars for some with a bit of girth and then just started mucking about on it really, leading to the crank arm falling off every 5 minutes [whoops!] so we now needed a new chainset….you know how hard it is to find a decent 150mm MTB chainset? pretty hard! So it spent most of the winter hung up at the back of the workshop.

We kept coming back to it every few weeks and finally decided to build it up for Andy to put on the Kona stand this year at our demo weekend as a bit of a surprise.

So we tracked down some shiver SC’s, which we assumed would be old school bolted crown style, which they weren’t so we got a chap at work to mill it off, fitted my 888 crowns and had Finn [ATB sales – ex TF tuned] reduce the travel to avoid any tyre + crown = death incidents.

The brakes are M4’s with the anodising removed and 220/200mm floating rotor [safety first!]

We rebuilt the original wheels with some proper MTB hubs so we could get a road cassette and 20mm axle on there. Oh and the chainset? We had our local engineering firm cut some RaceFace northshores down and drilled and tapped the arms. Problem solved. Add a chain device, de-anodised XTR mech and some other odds and sods and there you have it, the most expensive – impractical bike we could muster! Ha-ha

Dirt blogger and Champery resident Ben Walker just posted a similar story about a bike he built for a Russaion Prince (pic below), full story here.

is this 20″ kona shred the most expensive kids downhill mountain bike ever built