As far as geometry and weight, the 14x Sport is meant for older kids, from the late 3s up to 6 or 7. The 14x weighs 12 pounds without pedals, 15.5 pounds with, which is pretty light for a 14-inch bike, but double the weight of the 12 Sport. Couple that range with a handlebar stem that can be raised nearly 4 inches and a bar that can be tilted upward and forward nearly 4 inches, and you have an incredibly versatile and maneuverable little people mover. When I raised the bars to their maximum and rotated them halfway forward, even my 8-year-old had a blast whipping around the driveway with his friends without bumping his knees.
After all this—and after consulting with fellow parents and industry professionals—we’re judging the Strider 12 Sport as the best balance bike for most kids (and their parents). If you’d like higher gear ratios, it is not expensive to swap a casette or freehub. Probably, I would guess, these mountain bikes have thread-on freehubs that remove with a FR-1 tool (which should cost under $10, and needs a big wrench to go with it). A new freewheel hub costs about $20 to $30, and gives you an opportunity to increase the gear ratios. Regarding the bikes in the garage which needs brakes, seats, tires and possibly gears; those are not very expensive items.
Turn the handlebar into the correct position, tighten it down with the included Allen wrench, and adjust the seat post height, and your child is ready to roll. Thousands of parents around the world—from Japan to England to the US—love this brand for its Strider Cup races, a national championship balance bike series for 2- to 5-year-olds. These Fred Flintstone-powered criteriums were, not surprisingly, the brainchild of Strider founder and avid motocrosser Ryan McFarland. The zeitgeist of these races is nicely captured in this story and video by The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay, “The End of Training Wheels,” who describes a cross between Sesame Street and Mad Max. For this great Outside story, “Inside the Cut-Throat World of Toddler Bike Racing,” writer Ian Dille’s son actually competed in the race Gay was covering.
Modern V- and disc-style hand brakes are superior because they allow a child to stop with the pedals in any position—potentially important in an emergency stop situation. The 14x’s closest competition, the hybrid LittleBig, which is manufactured in Ireland, sells its 3-in-1 model as a hand brake–equipped balance bike and offers its freewheel pedal/sprocket assembly as a stand-alone option. In the US, North Carolina’s Glide Bikes does the same thing with its 12-inch Mini-Glider. The 14x Sports sold in non-US markets (keeping up with international bike standards) will, in fact, feature a freewheel and linear-pull hand brakes. Like the Strider 12 Sport, the REV 12 features a very low step-in height of 8 inches—a key aspect for a balance bike—and its seat height is adjustable between a very respectable 13.5 and 18.5 inches. The seat also has a neat little “grab handle” at the back for when the grown-ups need to give it a lift.
We checked in with Harry Sawyers and with Kalee Thompson, two Wirecutter editors who’ve worked on baby/kid stories. They were skeptical that balance bikes will ever go as mainstream as training-wheel–equipped bikes. To Sawyers, whose two kids gravitated toward trikes and scooters, it makes little sense to start a kid out on an expensive balance bike when the child might not even want to ride it. This point, however, is disputed by John Bradley, who said that, just like an adult, a child will be more likely to want to ride a lightweight, high-quality bike (which proved true among our testers). He also pointed out that such a bike will also sell on Craigslist for a pretty good percentage of what was paid for it, provided it was taken care of, making it a more digestible investment.
Geometry has a large effect on your riding position, bike handling and the overall “feel”, which seems to have been a factor in your enjoying the bikes on vacation. For example, putting slick tires on a mountain bike will reduce rolling resistance slightly, but you’ll still be in the same riding position and the bike’s handling won’t feel drastically different. Ryan McFarland, John Bradley, WeeBikeShop’s Ivan Altinbasak, and most everyone I interviewed consider training wheels to be about the worst thing you can put on kids’ bikes.
An included Allen wrench removes the single Allen bolt that secures the footrest. That same Allen bolt then attaches the pre-built sprocket assembly, which also comes complete with a correct-length loop of chain. Unlike huffy mountain bike most bikes, the 14x Sport’s rear fork/chainstay is designed with a tight inward angle at the front sprocket that allows the chain to be fixed in place without even removing the rear wheel—a brilliant modification.
It’s made with a steel frame and steel suspension to deliver one smooth ride after the next. It’s also equipped with a Shimano 18-speed derailleur and front and rear brakes to give you maximum control and comfort. Specialized’s Hotwalk is a solid bike, but for $175 it offered no hand brake, and the boys’ version had an unnecessarily high top tube. The Woom’s beautifully cast aluminum forks are attached to a unique steering limiter, which is little more than a strap and a thick O-ring bushing.
The knobby tires with 26-inch steel rims deliver a solid, effortless ride over tough terrain. The handlebar bar height itself is not adjustable via the stem—only by rotating the bar. We were impressed right off with the beautiful paint job and flawless welds on the Woom’s super-light aluminum frame. The smooth-rolling rubber tires have just enough knobbiness to grip in the dirt. Axles are secured to the bike via a set of rounded, recessed Allen bolts and recessed mounting points that make it essentially impossible for a child to snag a pant leg on or suffer a bruise from in a wipeout.
The comfortably cush seat is right for a little kid (at 4.5 by 7 inches) and even features scuff-proof sides for when it’s laid over on the pavement. While its air tires, alloy wheels, and standard (and very strong) ball-bearing headset make it slightly heavier than the Strider 12 Sport at 9 pounds, the REV 12 is still acceptably light. Our test kids generated slightly greater speed with the REV 12’s fat, inflatable tires, which are semi-knobby and offer good off-road traction. The bike’s 24-inch wheelbase, common to most of our picks, gives the bike a good mix of stability and agility. The tire valve stems also feature child-resistant valve caps—which you push down to turn like a child-safe lid on a bottle of pills—to keep your toddling tyke from mistaking them for raisins. The kids also liked the customizing sticker pack that came with the bike—letters, numbers, and illustrations of dinosaurs, birds, bunnies, and robots.