A UK Designer has come up with a full-sized wheel that can be completely
folded. Duncan Fitzsimmons' Crossbreed wheel doesn't have the poor-performance
delivered by the tiny wheels on folding bikes and despite sounding pretty
dangerous it actually works, as you can see in the video.
While the design is innovative, and avoids all the bumpy ride and gyroscopic
effects of traditional small wheels, to get it to be as light and strong as
possible it needs a carbon-fiber structure. This, says Fitzsimmons, is one of
the difficulties ahead as he tries to find a manufacturing partner.
His ultimate goal is to make a really "high end city bike or courier bike that
can fold up into a package like a golf bag, which could go into an overhead rack
on a train or go into a plane locker." With folding carbon-fiber wheels, don't
expect it to be cheap, though.
