While you’re seated at a stop, both feet can be kept flat-footed on the ground. In addition, the padded seat is designed to be a little farther back and with a lower center of gravity. This is a classic cruiser with a front basket, a built-in rear rack, a cup holder, and a matching set of fenders to keep you dry.
At first Horace manufactured products for service stations and steel bicycle rims, but sensing an opportunity during the Depression in 1934, he switched to making bicycles. You can get your kid started with balance biking as young as 15 months with a light bike with a low seat so they can simply sit, hold the handlebars, and walk around. With Strider’s excellent step-by-step instructions (here’s a video), buildout was a simple, 10-minute matter of slipping on a few nylon washers at the headset, sliding on a self-aligning clamp, and inserting and tightening the handlebar assembly. A properly fitted balance bike can enable children to balance on two wheels even as young as 18 months and is a fun first step toward learning to ride a bike. The huffy cruiser women’s mountain bike is quite good in terms of quality as an affordable, well-built, and long-lasting Full Suspension Mountain Bike for girls to ride. The frame design is very similar, with the same 18-speed configuration, but the Hyper Shocker is a men’s mountain bike, whereas the Huffy Trail Runner is a women’s mountain bike.
The Mini Glider also came with a freewheel (no coaster brake) pedal option, but with the marginally effective brakes, we couldn’t recommend the add-on. Our great experience with the Woom 1 began with the arrival of a slightly oversized box that allows the bike to be shipped from Woom’s facility in Texas with its wheels and hand brake already attached and perfectly adjusted. Assembly was thus reduced to snapping and screwing in the headset using the included 6 mm Allen wrench, setting the seat height with the quick-release levers, and handing the bike to our eager young tester.
In terms of construction, the Banana Bike was nowhere near as easy to build as our other picks. It comes with axles and accompanying hardware pre-threaded and attached, but the trick was attaching them to the front and rear forks so that they weren’t too loose or too tight. This required some attentive wrenching with two wrenches (the bike came with only one) and paying close attention to the diagram on the instruction sheet.
If you’re confident that you can persuade your youngster to give push biking a go (and money is a secondary concern), the aluminum-and-stainless-steel Woom 1 is a work of industrial art. With a featherweight frame and rubber-tired wheel set, custom-built and -selected componentry, a powerful hand brake, ideal geometry, and solid customer support, the Woom 1 is the perfect balance bike for kids age 18 months to 4 years. Geometry-wise, the Banana is very similar to our runner-up pick, the Co-op Cycles REV 12. The curved frame is well-engineered with a very low step-in height of 8.5 inches. The handlebar grips are marginally kid-scale with a grip circumference of 3.5 inches, and the seat is also right at the edge of what a little kid would need at a large 5.5 by 8 inches.
After determining that at least one Strider bike would be a final pick, I also spent an hour on the phone with Strider inventor Ryan McFarland. If you’re huffy bikes mostly riding on paved trails, then a Huffy mountain bike with wider tires and a suspension system may not be necessary. When it comes to choosing a bike, it is important to consider what kind of frame you want. If you are looking for a lightweight and durable option, then huffy trail runner a huffy bike might be the right choice for you. Brake-wise, we would like to see the 14x Sport come with a non-coaster setup such as hand brakes and a freewheel, allowing a child to “pedal backward” when they need a quick stability check (while climbing hills, for instance). But due to US regulations, so-called sidewalk bikes—the simplest, smallest type generally ridden by little kids—must be equipped with friction coaster brakes.
The Strider’s straight, mountain bike–style handlebars are a kid-size 14.5 inches wide, which makes the bike very responsive, while the tapered grips are toddler-friendly at 2 to 2.5 inches in diameter. Like most balance bikes sold today, the grips feature bulbs on their ends that prevent not only torso impalement from jackknifed handlebars but also scraped fingers from inevitable visits to gravel or pavement. The narrow seat allows for easy mounts and dismounts and features a gentle tilt downward from front to back to help keep your child saddled. Its surface is not too slick and not too sticky and comprises a durable yet just-soft-enough foam rubber. The bike comes with two easily interchangeable seat tubes—one short (8.6 inches) and one long (11.5 inches)—allowing adjustment heights from 11 to 20 inches, the widest range of any bike we tested and among the widest of any balance bike. Combined with handlebars that can rise nearly 5 inches on their own, you have a tiny bike that could be comfortably ridden by our 2-year-old tester and even my 8-year-old son.
We tested a few bikes with foam tires and found all—including the Strider’s—slid out far more easily than inflatable rubber tires on smooth surfaces like wood or tile floors. But the Strider tires appear to be made of a marginally softer and grippier material than our other foam-tired bikes, which helped mitigate some slides and handled bumpier dirt trails reasonably well. It also was nearly assembled right down to its pre-attached wheels, which were perfectly tightened so they spun freely without any play. Step-by-step instructions, both printed and online, were easy and fun and never frustrating.