I previously had an S&S coupled bike which I used for travel. Although the detachable frame couplers are a solid design, the downside is that the assembly/disassembly time for the bike was quite excessive for short trips. This post on the impracticality of S&S couplers for most people pretty much echoes my views.

Sometime around 2003 (?), I bought a used Bike Friday Pocket Rocket folding road bike as a replacement for the S&S coupled bike. There are a number of other bikes that fold smaller and/or quicker, but my goal was to have something that folded relatively quickly into a standard-sized airline luggage, yet with a ride quality as close as possible to that of my fast road bike.

I envisioned a couple of main uses for the bike: Continue reading →

Back in 2002 or so, I had a bicycle retrofitted with S&S couplers.  These allow the frame to be split into two pieces and disassembled into a small enough package to escape oversized baggage charges for air travel.  While this sounded like a great concept at the time, in practice assembly and disassembly time each take at least one hour (you can see photos of my packing sequence here).  Two hours of overhead is quite considerable when taking into account that the main purpose of the retrofit was for me to take the bike on short plane trips. Continue reading →