Who here has any experience with child sized dirt bikes?
The market for small 50cc dirt bikes seems to be awfully polluted with "pit bike" style rigs that have extremely high seat heights for the original intended consumers.
My boy is 7 years old in a month, and on the shorter side of things. He has an 18" inseam and is 44" tall. He really enjoys going out for little motorcycle rides with me (just around the neighborhood, never above 30mph so far, and he's wearing a motorcycle helmet). I'm thinking he'd really get a kick out of his own dirt bike. But I want it to be a surprise. His birthday is coming up in November and I think it'd be a great opportunity to get him a bike.
He's too big for the Yamaha PW50 (aka the "peewee"). That's aimed at the 3-5 year old market.
The Honda CRF50 is the next size up, and this seems to be the dream platform that all the pit bike community loves to mod. Used CRF50's are unobtanium around here. The Chinese pit bike industry produces clones of the CRF50, but where the actual Honda has a seat height of 21", the Chinese bikes range from 22 to 26 inches for their smallest clones. New CRF50's run about $1600, which certainly is some extreme sticker shock for me... the Chinese bikes are usually around $600-$800. Resale of Chinese bikes is garbage, resale of a well kept Honda is pretty good.
Since the CRF50 has such a rich mod community, raising or lowering the seat height is a matter of changing out rear suspension for longer or shorter assemblies. But the documentation on the minor variances of the Chinese bikes is pretty poor, and trial and error shopping of spring assemblies at $50 a piece can add up quick to where buyer's remorse of the cheap route can set in, making the real CRF50 look more appealing.