Introducing My Bicycle

I figured that I should first introduce my bike before I post up where I’ve been travelling… So here it is! Tada…

It’s a foldable bike from home. It’s been sitting in the garage folded up at my parents’ place for an odd twenty years or so (yes, that bike is older than me!) And since it was what I could fit in the car at the time, that’s the one I brought up (we have another mid-sized one with bigger wheels and five gears, but it was too small for me though it was too big to fit in the available car).

It basically folds up on itself, hence why the wheels are so small. Zooming in on the handle part, you can see how they fold down first. That little black handle at the back is the pivot point of the… arm? Shaft? (I gotta get into the bike component names):

Obviously, and ingeniously, the handle is designed to fold down at an angle in order to allow them to align parallel to the wheels (excuse all the dirt and dust in these photos! Really need to polish that bike up! The speckled rust is also surface stuff so it’s not really eroding anything).

Coming down to the middle section of the bike, we see the mechanism that allows it to fold up on itself. The silver metal part toward the bottom is the trap that locks the bike:

You have to push the flat metal part down in order to unlock it, after which the flat bit pops up:

The bicycle half folded:

There’s no lock to keep the bicycle in this folded position. But there’s a handy little part of the frame that acts as a handle for you to carry the bike. Unfortunately, as the age of this thing is older than me, it is quite heavy.. And it does take a bit longer to compact and unfold than just a few quick clicks.

And… here’s the bike folded! I couldn’t bother enough to lower the seat, nor the handles, but they do go right down, so you get the idea! It’s free-standing on flat ground:

As the final image, this is a demonstration of how I recorded my next few posts: with my iPod! I don’t have a GoPro so just started with this to see how it turns out… And I didn’t want my GoPro-lessness to delay me from starting to cycle!