A few weeks ago, I was riding my fat bike near Lake Nokomis when I was surprised to see a guy pedaling toward me on a bike with no front wheel. As the rider drew closer, I realized that it actually did have a front wheel—it had four of them, in fact, and they were very small. Instead of a standard bike wheel, the front fork terminated in a rollerblade.
That bicycle was designed and built by Kyle Alviani, a Bloomington-based mechanical engineer who by day works as a product designer at Wolf Tooth Components/Otso Cycles in Burnsville. And the surprises don’t stop with the rollerblade; Alviani has developed a contraption that lets him swap out the wheels for an ice skate, and take the bike tearing around on the city’s frozen lakes.
“I just thought it would be funny!” Alviani says of his creation. “Figured it would give my friends and I a good laugh, and it did.”
The story of the hybrid bike/rollerblade/ice skate actually begins a few winters ago, when its inventor built a ski fork for his fat bike…