With the snow melting and the season ripe for desert ramblings, Kyle Klain took his 2016 NAHBS-built Sklar fat bike and converted it to 29+. After spending all winter with fat-bike 26+ tires, this Sklar has undergone quite the transformation. This weekend while celebrating my 40th birthday in southeastern Utah, I documented Kyle’s stunning build in the morning sun. Check it out in detail below…

About the Frame

This is one of Adam Sklar’s early, and short-lived, fat bikes. Adam only built a handful of these frames before deciding not to offer them anymore. The bike pictured featured here was originally built for Colin Frazer, and Adam built himself one. Living in Bozeman, they were both curious about this platform but shortly after building the bikes, they both decided they weren’t really into fat bikes.

Adam included this bike in his 2016 NAHBS showcase and it sports a beautiful paint job by Black Magic Paint. Adorned with treeline silhouettes and other random insignia, it’s a real sleeper of a livery. You can get lost looking at it in various lighting. My personal favorite detail is treeline pattern that runs along the chainstay. Rudi and the team really knocked it out of the park with this one!

Colin held onto the bike for a while, kicking around the idea of using it as a desert touring bike, but, unfortunately, it sat unridden in my office storage in Los Angeles for a few years. He eventually sold it and the new owner decided fat bikes weren’t for him either, so it ended up online for sale again. Then my good friend Kyle Klain here in Santa Fe bought the bike, without knowing the backstory…

Kyle’s Build

So one day I’m at my computer working and Kyle sends me a text, exclaiming that he needs to sell his old fat bike because he just picked up a new Sklar. I knew Adam had only made a handful of those bikes and I had a suspicion that I knew which one Kyle had bought. Low and behold, Colin’s old fat bike ended up in Kyle’s possession. We spent the winter months riding our snow-covered trails—his wife, Kim, has a sweet Rocky Mountain—and enjoying our fresh powder days but once the snow melted, he had bigger plans for the build.

To revamp the Sklar, Kyle started with a Rogue Panda custom framebag and a new fork. The original Sklar fork hit the downtube—one of the unfortunate byproducts of a hurried NAHBS deadline—so Kyle picked up a Fatback fork to replace it. Then came the new 29+ wheelset with a Shutter Precision fat-bike-spaced hub. Raceface cranks, Oveja Negra bags, XT mech, SUNringlé wheels, Magura brakes, Sinewave Beacon lamp with a custom-fabricated mount, and a Thomson post and stem rounded out the build.

A pair of DOOM Bars from down the hill in Albuquerque was the literal icing on the cake!

Kyle took his fat bike and converted it into a perfect desert rambler. The 29+ platform bodes well with the fat frame clearances, raising the bottom bracket height slightly but keeping the steering nimble. A major critique of fat bikes is the wide q-factor, an argument I personally don’t understand. Kyle shares the same sentiment. Riding with your feet as wide as your hips is not only better for your knees but is largely more efficient. I like the analogy of doing leg presses or squats in the gym. You want your feet to be wide to push the weight and with a desert bike, you’ll be doing exactly the same thing, as many tours require multiple liters of water…

This weekend, Kyle broke in the new build. He shared some of his favorite desert locales with a small group of friends, and we pedaled from our camp to hidden gems, through deep sand, and over slickrock escarpments. It was a dreamy experience. Here’s to many more weekends of dusty feet and red-dirt-caked drivetrains…

Got any questions? Drop them in the comments!