Skis instead of wheels - how hard can it be? Not hard at all, actually. The hard part is making the geometry work well on snow.

We used a road fork because we figured it would be nice and long and give maximum clearance between the BB/pegs and the ground, I mean snow. This also moves the head angle further away from vertical, which might not be a good thing. Even after our first tests, we discovered that the shibike has a tendency for the rear end to come around, which is fun but not very controllable. I think this is caused by our high (far from vertical) head angle. When the bars are turned the front ski not only turns (around a vertical axis), but also is rotated around a horizontal axis, causing it to be at a greater angle to the snow than the rear ski, which can only be rotated horizontaly by leaning the bike. The solution seems to be to decrease (make more vertical) the head angle. We can do this by finding a frame with a steeper head angle, like a flatland frame maybe, or by using a shorter fork. I am gong to try to install a BMX fork which should help, but at the expense of BB clearance.

The bananna seat was chosen because it would give us the ability to move forward and back while sitting to control the weight distibution. It turns out that the skibike performs best when the rider is standing, so a regular seat would probably be fine. Note the extra padding in the tailbone area :)

The picture below makes it look like the rear ski is smaller that the front ski, which at least one reader has pointed out, would be quite stupid. This is some sort of photographic illusion, as in fact the skis are both the same length. They are a pair of 90cm kids skis. I think the ideal ski setup woule be a rear ski about 120cm long and a front ski maybe 60 cm long. As it is, the front ski as way too much control over the bike as explained above.

Pegs instead of cranks. These "Cheese Tube" pegs (thanks LAO) are just the right size so that the shoulders of the pegs rest on the inner shoulders of the BB cups. The pegs are bolted to eachother and voila.

Feel free to openly weep at the beauty of the black spraypainted pressure treated 4x4 wooden blocks used for the ski mounts.

The bungees are for keeping the skis relatively horizontal to avoid nasty accidents. Getting the geometry and tension right on the front bungee ski stabalizer was the hardest part. Bungees at different angles act surprisingly differently.

Also note the snazzy headset :)