A decade ago Surly lead the charge in mainstreaming the fat bike. Back in 2005, the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company introduced the Pugsley, the first widely available fat bike back. Since then fat bikes have grown increasingly fatter and their geometry has come to mimic that of trail bikes. To keep its line current, Surly has developed a new do-anything, go-anywhere, ride-any-day-of-the-week fat bike called the Wednesday.
Related: The best fat bikes of 2015
The Wednesday is more well-rounded than the heavy-duty Ice Cream Truck
While Wednesday is technically the younger sister of Pugsley in The Addams Family lore, it’s better thought of as a slightly downsized version of the very capable Surly Ice Cream Truck.
The Ice Cream Truck can handle the largest 5in fat bike tyres on 100mm rims, while the Wednesday can fit 4.6in treads on 80mm-wide rims when the bolt-on rear axle is mounted in the rearward position in its slotted dropouts. In its stock form, the Wednesday comes with 26x3.8in Surly Nate tyres mounted to Surly’s new 80mm tubeless-compatible Other Brother Darryl rims.
While the Ice Cream Truck gains its massive tyre clearance from an ultra-wide 132mm press-fit bottom bracket and the use of 197mm rear axle spacing, the Wednesday makes due with a much more pedal-friendly 100mm threaded BB shell and a 177mm rear axle.
Like the Ice Cream Truck, the Wednesday was designed to be compatible with a 100mm suspension fork, such has the RockShox Bluto.
Dropper compatible? Heck yes!
The frame has plenty of braze-ons for racks and fenders. There’s a port on the seat tube for an internally-routed dropper seatpost and it also has triple bottle mounts for cargo cages on the fork blades as well as the downtube for bikepacking adventures. Like all of Surly's models, the Wednesday is constructed from 4130 chromoly steel tubing.
The Wednesday's utility is by no means limited to trudging through snow and beach cruising. In fact, it should be able to get rowdy on singletrack, with a relaxed 69 degree head tube angle, long top tubes across the five-bike size range that are intended to be paired with short stems, and chainstay lengths that range from 435 to 455mm, depending on where the rear axle is positioned in the dropouts.
The Wednesday can be set up with a geared or singlespeed drivetrain
The Wednesday will be available this fall. The frame with fork will retail for $650/£450. The complete bike with a SRAM X5 2x10 drivetrain will be priced at a very reasonable $1,500/£1,500. (Australian pricing was not immediately available.)
Visit www.surlybikes.com for more information.
