One of the toughest parts of a kids bike to upgrade can be the crankset, with many shipping with the older square-hole mount and triple chainring clusters with all of the rings permanently pinned together. The former means you can’t just slap one a high end crankset on it (which would probably be too long anyway), and the latter means it’s all but impossible to convert it to a 1x or 2x system to save a little weight.
Fortunately, upstart premium youth mountain bike brand Trailcraft is now selling their own cranksets separately, making it easy to upgrade your kids bike to a proper crankset that comes with 32/22 chainrings and an external bash guard, which helps with outboard chain retention. Once you’ve got ’em, you can slap any 104BCD chainring down to a 30-tooth on them, including the Race Face narrow-wide chainrings used on their complete 1×10 Pineridge bikes.
They mount onto the standard tapered square spindle bottom bracket commonly used on kid’s bikes. Weight is 448g (cranks, rings, bash guard and bolts), length is 152mm and retail is $79.99.
