SPORT REPORT : Big Wheels

When he was a child, Arthur Dillon rode as a child. On a regular bike with 24-inch wheels. Now that he’s a man, he naturally rides a man’s cycle--with 132-inch wheels.

That’s right, 11-foot wheels.

Dillon, a house painter living in Inglewood, has been making crazy bikes since he was a kid. “I was 11. I saw this guy riding on two bikes he’d welded together vertically. Six and a half feet tall! I said, ‘I can do that.’ I’ve been doing it ever since.”

But his first serious attempt at a big bike came 20 years later, when he welded a frame for the 48-inch wheels of two “bone-shakers”--the turn-of-the-century bikes with huge front wheels and tiny rear wheels. He has since made or collected everything from a “pyramid bike”--three bikes he welded on top of each other for him and his two kids to ride at the same time--to a unicycle with a seven-foot wheel. “My daughter Tralyia--she’s 15--she got on that thing and rode off first time, no trouble.”

But nine months ago, Dillon got really ambitious. “I thought, ‘I can go bigger than bone-shakers; I’m going to build the biggest bike in the world.’ ”

So he got a friend to build him two 11-foot wheels, while he made the frame. But when he assembled it, he found that it was impossible to balance. “So I decided to go for the world’s biggest tricycle” and added a 70-inch front wheel.

His 7-year-old son Christopher sits in a special seat above. “We ride in parades like the Martin Luther King Day,” says Dillon. “He loves it. I think I’ve got him hooked, just like I was.”

What about the Guinness Book of World Records? “They’ve said they want to see pictures and interview friends and neighbors,” he says. “But heck, how can they turn me down? You’d have to be mad to make one any bigger.”