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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.
