Cheap bikes for a three year old (Advice on buying a first bike - Safety Issues)

Member Name: ahenry

Product:	Advice on buying a first bike - Safety Issues
Date:	22/08/01 (891 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Second hand saves money

Disadvantages: Not so shiny as new ones

My daughter is 3 years old. I had bought here a plastic tricycle for her a while ago for £10 from the local paper. This has a bar to help push her along, but it isn't much good for riding under her own power.

She wanted another bicycle and was quite specific about what she wanted. It had to be pink and it had to have a seat on the back to put a doll. I had a look around for a while to see what was available. She needed a bike with 12 inch wheels. All the decent bike shops I tried had basically the same (not very good) quality of bike. I asked the owner of a reasonable bikeshop the features that marked out the £100 bikes that he was selling and he said they were all basically the same quality, and the differences were in the number of accessories and the intricacy of the paint jobs.

If you spend more and get one from a good bike shop, then they might give it a once over to check its adjusted correctly. However, this isn't difficult to do yourself. With kid's bikes, there isn't much that you can adjust in any case. When things break on them, its quite rare that you can buy spare parts separately- you often need to cannibalise another broken bike to get the bits.

In the end I visited a police bike auction where they sell stolen and recovered stuff. I bought a pink bike with 12 inch wheels and a rear carrier for £6.60 as well as a 14 inch wheel BMX bike for £26. The pink bike was a bit worn, and it had a broken saddle and a front wheel that squeeked if you lent on it. I bought another bike for £2 from a council refuse site and swapped over the saddle and front wheel from that. My daughter hasn't noticed the small scratches on the frame. Similar bikes in local bikeshops were about £50, or about £35-40 from discount WWW sites.

The BMX bike was hardly used, and still had the moulding flash on the tyres. It is missing one pedal, but as the bike will be too big for my daughter for a while yet, I'm just keeping an
eye out for a cheap one, rather than spending money on a replacement at a bike shop. Similar bikes to this were £80-100 in bikeshops, or £50-60 on the WWW. As far as my daughter was concerned, the best thing about this bike was the Barbie bell, so I've swapped that onto the pink one for now.

http://www.bargaincrazy.com/ (in the nursery & toys section, select outdoor) has a couple of cheap young kid's bikes. http://www.sterlinghouse.co.uk/ also sell cheap catalogue return bikes. http://www.woolworths.co.uk/ also sells some reasonably cheap bikes.

For older kids (say 6 years and older), then it may well be worth spending more on better quality bikes. These may well have components which are more durable and better suited to the size of the bike. Older kids are also more likely to wear out a bike, which often doesn't happen with younger kids as they don't get to ride them enough to cause a lot of wear.

I bought a cycling helmet for £6 in a bike shop. I would also like to buy some cycling gloves that would fit, but I haven't found and decent ones. You _never_ see professional cyclists riding without gloves, although some don't wear helmets.

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