So today I picked a PUKY kid's bike up from a nice family who had offered it on freecycle. It'd been been used by both their children and they were now passing it on. A bit scuffed and scratched, but otherwise in pretty good working condition.
I got it for my little boy Gabriel, who is 3 & 3/4 - up until now he's been riding one of those little wooden bikes with no pedals.
Anyway when I got it home I realised it's a bit bigger than I'd originally thought but putting the saddle down low, it seems to be a reasonable size for him. He was very excited!
I pushed him around the park and he quite quickly got the basic hang of it - he was able to ride unassisted in a rather precarious way. He doesn't seem to understand braking yet though (it has a front handbrake and a rear backpedal brake).
He fell off a couple of times and there were a few scratches and a few tears but otherwise he seemed to enjoy it.
However, I am now a little concerned that it's a bit too big for him. It's the
Z6 model I think and although he is tall enough for it (he's very tall for his age) he's only average weight for his age and he did seem to find pedalling the thing at the supplied gear ratio rather hard going when there was any incline against him. Although the bike is very robustly built, it is rather heavy! He does have difficulty pulling it upright, and if it fall over even when he's got his feet on the floor it'll often take him with it.
In fact.... (runs off with the bathroom scales...) ... Jesus! It's 10kg! Gabriel's only 16kg himself!
I'm wondering if I should look into seeing if it's possible to put a smaller front cog on the bike, or perhaps see if anyone out there would like to swap it with one of the smaller bikes lower down in the range. I like the design of the Puky bikes, but that is very heavy.