After a trip home to London, I returned to Nairobi, Kenya thinking about all the folding bikes I saw. Why did they have to have tiddly, dinky little wheels? I realised that they have small wheels so that they can be folded up to a small package. The wheel is the last indivisible item on a bike, and therefore is the limit. So then I wondered, what if you could fold the wheel?

 

Impossible!.....or perhaps not.

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I embarked on a multi year journey of trying to reinvent the wheel. I moved to Oakland, California with my wife and fully intended to get a regular job and tinker on the side. I interviewed at several places and experienced America's racism in my struggles; strangely aggressive interviews that questioned whether I had really had done the things I claimed. They showed incredulous disbelief that I could have done the things I had done. Or interviewers that asked for examples of creativity and when having a wheel fold before their eyes in a way never seen by anyone on the planet, still claimed that I wasn't creative enough. I decided that I didn't want anyone to hold that power over me. I didn't want to code-switch and hide my blackness in order to survive in an office. So I started Tuck Bike. It's my baby, and I wear shorts and crocs to work. 

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But I digress, you're here for bikes!!!!! If you check out the prototype journey gallery, you'll see the many trials and errors along the road. I've folded the bicycle wheel. Other small wheeled bikes say they "feel just like a normal bike", well Tuck is a normal bike. It just happens that the wheels fold. It's ridiculous. I'm ridiculous.

 

I'm the inventor of Tuck Bike, the folding bike with a folding wheel.

 

Come join in the fun!

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Cheers!

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Alex Animashaun