Bike Friday

Customized BF

Bike Friday is a brand of high performance travel, commuter, and folding bicycle made by Green Gear Cycling of Eugene, Oregon, United States. The company also builds tandem bicycles,[1] cargo bikes,[2] bicycles that adjust to different sizes,[3] and custom bicycles for people with short stature.[4]

Hardware

The Bike Friday travel bike emphasizes riding characteristics rather than foldability. It packs into a suitcase and "rides like your best bike" according to Ed Pavelka, former senior editor of Bicycling magazine. The company's co-founders and designers hail from a racing background, rather than a traditional engineering background. The company history says they sought to invent a packable bicycle that rode well over serious distances, loaded or unloaded, to save airline baggage fees.

Bike Friday Tandem Traveler
"Pocket Rocket" model

The range includes tandems, triplets, road, mountain and touring models, a freight bicycle, and a bicycle that adjusts in sizing. Each fits into one or two standard suitcases that can be converted to a towable trailer.

Most Bike Fridays are built to order, and all are built in their Eugene factory.[5]

Opinions

Cyclists owning a Bike Friday include broadcaster Phil Liggett, Race Across America champ Lon Haldeman, and Heinz Stücke.[6] The Folding Society's Buyer's Guide describes it as: "A high performance bike that folds. The sales pitch is that it rides as well as your best bike (aiming it by implication at the existing cycling enthusiast who feels a need for a folder), and this is quite a fair description.... Folding is not as easy as some of the others, and it is rather bulky when folded." Other member reports at the Folding Society seem to concur, both that it "really is a very good high performance bicycle," but that it "isn't the most convenient or easiest folder."

The same company's Tikit bike addresses the market segment more interested in a convenient, easy fold while still performing as a high performance commuter bike.[7]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bike Friday.

Notes

  1. ↑ http://bicycletimesmag.com/review-bike-friday-tandem-traveler-xl/
  2. ↑ http://www.tinyhelmetsbigbikes.com/blog-we-ride/the-bike-friday-haul-a-day
  3. ↑ http://www.bikefriday.com/blog/?p=1287
  4. ↑ http://www.bikefriday.com/bicycles/bantam_fridays
  5. ↑ http://www.bikefriday.com/about_us/made_in_oregon
  6. ↑ http://thelazyrando.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/heinz-stuckes-bike-friday-pocket-llama/
  7. ↑ http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/tikit/

References

  1. ^ Richard Ballantine (2001), Richard's 21st-Century Bicycle Book, Overlook Press, ISBN 1-58567-112-6

External links