At first glance, I thought this was a gimmick to draw attention. A helluva gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless. Turns out it’s quite real, even if it is just an early version of a conversion kit.

Phil Wood, with a little help from Jay Jeremy Sycip, built a functioning set of parts to turn Santa Cruz’s V10 downhill mountain bike into a fat tired snow bike. It uses adapters at the bottom bracket, a massive rear hub, altered Manitou Dorado and more to make it happen.

They also had new track cranks and seat collars. Bike and parts pics, details and suspension of practicality below…

The 135mm front hub required new crowns for the Manitou Dorado inverted fork. It’s a 29er Dorado with a stopper inside to limit travel to 6″.

It has a 185mm wide rear hub, which is 15mm wider than a standard snow bike hub. They make the hubs and the axles and just made a longer axle. The rear wheel is a Surly that’s designed to be laced with 32 spokes. They laced two sets of holes for a 64 spoke build to make it as stiff and strong as possible since weight wasn’t as much of a concern. It’s such a big wheel they had to use a motorcycle truing stand to build the wheel!

They made a spacer kit to spread the crankset out and get the clearance and chain line right.

They’re still fine tuning the concept and will show an even higher end version at Interbike. Sycip rear end is made by Jeremy SyCip to fit Santa Cruz’s pivot position specs. They’ll lengthen the chainstays a bit more to fit a knobbier tire. Rear end travel is 8″.

As much as anything, this is likely a design exercise to see what’s possible and ferret out interest. Want your own? Let ’em know.

Phil Wood also has a new track crankset that’ll be $650.

Seat collar is $35 and will be available with 28.6, 31.8 and 34.9 inside diameters. And yes, that’s purple ano.