Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I tried out a Bradley, Fat Tire, and L. L. Bean snow tube over a couple days. All of them are great fun and seem solidly constructed. I used the cigarette-lighter-powered tire pump from my car to inflate them. The Bradley tube is slower than the others. The slick bottom portion of the cover is slightly textured. It also doesn't have a leash built in, though it does have a loop to attach the leash; I just tied on a rope, which worked fine. It's a good tube if you have someone who doesn't want to go super fast (though it can still get going quickly once the sled run is established; maybe 80-90% of the other tubes' speeds). The inner tube on ours ended up bulging a bit after some use, even though it was inflated about the same as the Fat Tire and L. L. Bean which didn't bulge; it seems to be cosmetic only, and may be user error. The L. L. Bean tube is decidedly the fastest. It has a slightly lower profile than the Bradley or Fat Tire, and has a hard shell bottom instead of a plastic/canvas type bottom. It's slick enough that it often starts sliding down the hill on its own if you forget to flip it upside down when out of use. It also has a nice detail in the leash: there's a twist in the handle so that it's always easy to get a mitten through the loop. Fat Tire is a close second (to L. L. Bean) for speed. Its flexible bottom cover is slicker than Bradley's, but the covers are otherwise very close to the same size and shape. It does have a built in leash, though the handle tends to flatten out, so it takes a moment to poke a mittened hand through. It does feature round handles instead of just canvas straps, but practically I didn't find it mattered much. Any of these tubes is great on a sledding hill, and it seems like they'll last many seasons.