Niken you will miss it with a front wheel going
each side, but the rear locks into it. This is the
same on the road. With two inline wheels you
look for a 100mm wide smooth line, but on
the Niken it’s more like a two feet wide line. never seems to bottom out – it just takes
everything in its stride, effortlessly.
Instinctively I thread a line between pot
holes, but sometimes that’s trickier with two
front wheels. Really, it’s just a slight mental
adjustment, but definitely something to get
used to. While the actual ride feel is remarkably
similar, almost disturbingly so… given how
much extra engineering is going on up-front. There is no point in me going into fine detail
about how the front-end works, I’m not an
engineer and it’s a very sophisticated system.
But the basics are four USD forks, two on
either side, support each individual front wheel
to stop it twisting and stay in line. The forks
have 110mm travel and are robustly clamped
to two parallelograms that are mounted to
a central pivot with a steering arm and link
underneath them. Above the two sets of fork
clamps are two steering heads. As the bike
is laid over the parallelograms pivot allowing
the inside wheel to rise, the outside wheel to
extend and keeping the amount of suspension
travel available the same both sides. But the
two sets of forks can still react independently
to bumps. While this is going on, the steering
arm is obviously taking care of aiming the twin
15-inch wheels in the right direction. Phew.
On a smooth road in normal conditions
it absolutely feels like a conventional bike.
However, at times, only rarely though, there’s
the feeling of a slight amount of extra inertia/
weight through the front of the bike, but,
oddly, it’s not really felt through the bars.
However, there is a more obvious weight at
the bars when changing lock doing wheelies…
the only time it’s really felt through the bars.
The suspension action up front is genuinely
excellent, very plush, very controlled, it
IT’S COMPLICATED
KIWI RIDER 57