Ozark Trail Fat Bike, Thoughs and review

Ozark Trail Fat Bike Thoughts

 I was looking for a bike to keep riding while there is snow and ice on the ground and as I was looking at bikes Walmart offered a fat tire bike in their line of Ozark Trail bikes. It is priced right around the same as the Ozark Trail Ridge but from the images I as on the site I knew there were some major differences in the quality of the two bikes. I know that the two bikes are not directly comparable but the G.1 explorer and the Ridge have a lot of the same stuff that make them good so I was hoping to see a few more things on this bike. That being said with out going through the whole review I looked at other fat tire bikes in the same price range and figured it was better than them so I bought it. 

The set up was not as good as prior Ozark Trail bikes.

I don't know if this bike has a proper name from Walmart because they listed it as fat tire bike and the box reads fat tire bike but the bike itself has M.3 Ranger on it so it might be the Ozark Trail M.3 Ranger I am not fully sure but it came in today and the box had seem some better days but there was no major damage to the bike but there was damage. 

Form those pictures you can see the box was not too damaged but it was not in good condition either. but the bike inside was packed in a way where that was not much of a problem except for a few things one being the stem. 

You can see the scuffs on the stem rubbed well past the paint and damaged the metal but its not damaged enough to be an issue and it will still hold the bars just fine. It just looks bad and not something I am exactly happy about from a new bike even though it was a cheap bike its new and I should not have scuffs on it from shipping. There was also some scuffs in the middle of the rims.

Now this is minor and for the most part I wont notice these things but its a brand new bike and having it already marked up is just not fun but I plan on riding this bike in the winter with snow, ice, and salt so its going to have its fair share of use and abuse meaning I bet I will have to replace things quicker than on my other bikes. 

After inspecting the bike and removing all of the plastic wrapping and zip ties I got to putting the bike together and I noticed some funny things while do things and understand a bit better why a bike on a walmart shelf might be set up wrong on the shelf. 

Right out of the box you can see something common with all Walmart bikes. The stem is facing the rear of the fork... If I did not know at least a little on how to set up a bike properly then I would have assumed that this was right and just put the handle bars on and called it a day. I had to unscrew the stem to get it to face the proper way so it was put on the wrong way and tightened at the factory like this. This was not the worst problem that this bike had out of the box though. 

This to me was a bigger problem than the fork facing the wrong way. It is a bit hard to see here but there should be a cable coming out of the end of this brake lever. I ended up finding out what happened to the cable sort of but I am not sure how or why it happened. The cable was pulled as tight as it could go against the housing, the whole cable was then clamped to the front brake, and then it was pushed into the headtube. This ended up causing the front brake cable to have a ton of cable on the piston and not even an inch of cable to hook up the brake. All of the peices were there they were just so poorly installed that instead of getting it even close they just pushed the cable into the headtube. Fixing this was easy enough I had to just losen the cable at the brake piston and then pull it until I could get it hooked up into the brake lever. Not a hard fix but how did this happen in the first place was there no quality control at all? 

After all of those things got sorted and I fiddled with everything to make sure things were adjusted just right I got working on making sure the derailure was set up properly. Well. wouldn't you know it was not. Now I expected this to be the case so no big deal but turing this thing was a pain. It seemed like nothing I did was getting it to true but I got it close enough where it was not skipping gears or jumping back and fourth like it was when I first tested it. 

Before a test ride I measured. 

I don't know much about fat bikes and what someone might look for as far as tire width goes or hight but the wheels on this are 26x4 according to the website. I took some measurements to see if you get get 5 inch tires on this bike if I wanted to upgrade to larger tires but I do not think they would fit I think this would only go as large as 4.2 or so before it becomes a problem. That being said I don't know a ton about fat bikes and I could be wrong on the tires. 

Front fork has about 5 inches of room between the forks and about 2 inches of clearance at the top.

The rear wheels have about the same 5 inches and 2 inches of height at the top but the bottom seems to only have a clearance of half an inch on these 4 inch tires making me think you could not go wider than 4.2 or so with out running into issues. 

Test Ride thoughts.

I started the ride on the road like I normally do for all my rides and the bit on the road was fine no issues and braking was working so things seemed fine. Then I got to the gravel section and started to have a problem with the derailleur riding in gear 3-4 was causing skipping but it was not too bad it was like every 100 feet the chain would skip up or down a gear and then back. I am not sure which way it was doing it as I was riding when it was happening. I figured I could ignore it until a few miles in and try to fix it. The problem is that about 3 miles into the ride it got worse to the point where it was every 10 feet or so and in every gear except the higest and lowest. I had to pause the riding to fix the derailleur. I got things aligned properly and made sure it was not skipping when I tested and got back to riding luckily for me I did not have do anything else and the rest of the ride was smooth. 

Aside from the derailleur the ride was nice. I have not ridden a fat bike in a very long time and I have never owned one before so I was not sure what to expect when I started riding but the main thing was I kept reading that it was sluggish and harder to ride as the weight and tire size made them heavy. Well after riding I do not think this was sluggish but the bike is very heavy and ride differently than other bikes. Something a little odd to me was I lean into turns and I don't know if that is proper but I don't really turn the wheel I more lean into turns. When I attempted that on this bike the tire turned itself and kinda just turned with out really leaning. Its hard to explain exactly but it was different than my other bikes when turning. I also thought pedaling was going to be harder because I read a lot of that online about fat bikes being hard to pedal due to weight but the gearing on this bike is kind of perfect for me. I was able to get it up to speed and the top gear felt like I had more I could push out of it and the lowest gear was fine for hills. I will note I did not bother to check the PSI on the tires and they were inflated higher than you would want on a fat bike. This will impact the speed and ease of pedaling a bit but its not like going down a few PSI will make this bike very hard to move it will just make it a little more sluggish and that would still not be sluggish to me. 

The stopping power of the Ozark Trail Fat bike could be improved a lot. The brakes that are on it are JAK brakes, they are labeled different but they are JAK. and I hate them. I hate that brand and these brakes are no different than others I have used in the past. They stop the bike but much slower than they should. Its almost like they come from the factory covered in oil and never seem to get that slickness off of them. When I squeeze a brake lever I want the bike to stop not slide for a while then slow down to a stop I want to know I am stopping. The Ozark Trail G.1 Explorer does not have good brakes and I had to replace the pads on it and new pads made it stop perfectly but it stops perfectly now. The Ozark Trail Fat Tire bike has the same stopping power I had before I had to replace my brakes on the explorer.  I am going to assume that new pads will fix this problem but this is a brand new bike and the brakes should work fine with out having to sand them or use a torch on them or any other thing you might need to do other than bed them in. The worst thing though is the rear brake lever is a shifter lever combo. This means to replace the brakes with something better than cable disk brakes I would have to get a new shifter as well. 

Just look at how bad that set up is. The Ridge does not have a shifter brake lever combo why would they put one on this? Are the tires that much more where they had to cut other corners to get the cost down to a similar price? Either way other fat bikes in this price range had grip shifter and this is not a grip shifter so that is a big plus for me. This shifter for all of the amount I hate it shifts fine and the brake does engage when I pull the lever its just slow at stopping due to bad JAK brakes. 

The whole test ride was 9 miles and about 3 miles of it is a gravel dirt mix. I also made sure to ride the bike on some of the leaf covered areas that were small off trails that normally I would not ride just to test this on something more slippery than gravel. The bike rode fine over everything as I thought it would. I had no issues with traction and did not feel like the bike was going to slip at all even on the damp leaves. I also ended up at the skatepark off the trail and rode it up a few ramps and boxes just to see if I could get this heavy bike up over things. I was able to bunny hop over things but it was not as high as normall though I could still get over anything I need to so it was a good fun test at the skatepark. I also thought it would be funny to see a fat bike at a skatepark riding the ramps. 

Other thoughts about the bike.

I have only taken this bike on a single 9 mile test ride and part of it was getting problems resolved but so far I think its not a bad bike. There are corners that they cut though and I have to assume it is for cost. Other than the cheap brakes and combo shifter thing the peddals are weird. They are grippy and I did not slide off of them at all but they are not something I would put on another bike. I might buy new peddals just to take these off this bike. The color of them is nice but I am not sure if they are plastic or metal. They have a metal sound when I tap my ring on them but feel far to light to be metal. A magent does not stick to them so if they are some metal its not one a magent will stick to. They felt flimsy when I put them on but they worked for the ride so time will tell how really are. 

The kickstand is another thing I just don't know what to think of it. Its a kickstand that came on the bike so I did not bother taking it off but its like a tiny metal rod that hardly holds the bike up. I am not saying they had to put a better kickstand on this bike but they could have put it in the middle to hold the weight of the bike more center instead of the back where the front then kinda of has too much weight and it looks like it could tip. From playing around with the kickstand it wont tip with out at least some wind but it looks like it will and its a very cheap kickstand that I should take off.

Lastly there is no internal cable routing for this bike. I am not sure if that is common or uncomon on fat bikes but the other two Ozark Trail bikes I bought have internal cable routing so its hard for me to think that it would be a cost thing. The G.1 explorer is 250 dollars and it has internal cable routing so this could have it too. I would think with the type of riding you do on a fat bike they would try to make all the points where calbes to get gummed up covered but there are exposed cables under the top tube where stuff could get into. I would prefer the way the Ridge has external cable routing to what this fat bike does. I would rather have a palce to zip tie cables than open cables under the top tube. Its an odd choice to not have interanl cable routing or a place to zip tie closed cables but there could be some reason for it that I am not aware of. Still seems cheap and wrong to me. 

Conclusion

So far I like this bike and want to ride it again soon. I want to have a bit of snow to test this bike out fully on too. I think it will be a good ride and I am sure I will enjoy it. If I have to give this bike a number rating its close to a 5 out of 10. It has problems and its cheap in places I do not think it has to be cheap in. If you are looking for a fat bike that is just for a season of fun or what not this is better than other fat bikes in the price range but check used too. I do not think the problems I have with this bike make it a bad bike nor do I think that 5 out of 10 is a bad score exactly its just the cost and comparison to the other bikes in the Ozark Trail line up are better. For almost 400 dollars you get a bike that is just at the bottom of okay where Ozark Trail G.1 is an awesome bike for 250. I still want to ride this bike more but cheap components, bad cable management, and lack of easy upgradability lower the score of this bike for me. 

I am off to think about where else I can ride this new bike and maybe take it to the beach and lower the tire pressure and ride it through the sand. Thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day!