I’d heard all the quips and received all the looks that come with a large dude pedaling furiously while perched upon a tiny-tired folding bike, but if I was worried about looks I’d be sitting behind a SnapChat filter. “Clown bike” or not, I couldn’t help but love the incredibly practicality and intriguing engineering that comes with a folding bicycle.

The grand philosopher of early 90’s hip hop, in sharing his thoughts on voluptuous derrières quipped: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” For reasons unknown, Baby Got Back was running through my head as I stared at the package on my workshop floor, although instead of the good Sir’s opener, my lizard brain had edited the lyrics to “I like folding bikes and I don’t know why.”

This was factually correct. I’d long held a strange affinity for folding bicycles, without really fitting in the market for which they were targeted, save for a brief stint as an urban commuter. I acquired my first folder, a Dahon, while living in the suburbs, to tool around in the neighborhood in addition to my road bike. When work moved my family to Paris, I grew frustrated with relying on the Metro, which was crowded when operating, and subject to not-infrequent strikes, and I acquired a Brompton folder from a Paris-based shop. This made good sense living in an apartment on the 4eme etage (the French way of saying the 5th floor) of a walk-up apartment, and it was a blast to zoom to work in La Defense, flip my folder closed, and stash it next to my desk, and slightly less wonderful but still preferred to leaving it outside, to schlep the folded package up to our apartment in the evening.

I brought the bike back from Paris, selling it several years after our return in a bit to reduce our growing bicycle fleet, although I still missed the fun of riding my red “clown bike,” although from a purely practical perspective it didn’t make much sense when my adventure bike was perfectly suited to tooling around town when not exploring further afield.

I’d assumed folders were in my rearview mirror, until perhaps I returned to some hip city and became the cool old guy on the wacky bicycle, but a desire for a tandem for my kids and I had me reach the surprising conclusion: a folder was a viable option for a tandem.

I wanted a tandem with a widely adjustable “stoker” (aka the copilot/rider in the back) that would accommodate my kids as they grew, or when we changed stokers, and also allow for the slight possibility of my wife joining me, should I catch her at a moment of weakness when she’d be willing to sit behind me and be seen in public on an odd-looking contraption.

I discovered there were essentially two out-of-the box options if you wanted this range of adjustability: the Comotion Periscope, and the Bike Friday Family Tandem or Tandem Twos’day.

My initial search was biased towards the Comotion, and I looked for used examples, which proved difficult. It seems there’s a small circulation of these family tandems and they’re quickly snapped up on the used market, with examples in good condition selling for basically new bike prices after shipping was factored in. I also began to consider how I’d transport a tandem on our family adventures that were further afield, and began examining special tandem roof racks and other options in what was becoming an increasingly complex and costly venture.

I then saw a used Bike Friday tandem pop up on one of the classifieds. It wasn’t exactly what I initially thought I wanted, but the idea of a folding tandem was intriguing. Some YouTube research indicated it was far from the 60-second fold of my old Brompton, but if I could disassemble the bike in 10 minutes or so, into a package that would fit into the back of a vehicle, that suddenly started to make a lot of sense, especially if the alternative was putting the roof rack on the car, adding a special tandem carrier, and hoisting a heavy bike above my head and then remembering not to drive the bike-laden car into the garage maiming house, bike, and car in one fell swoop. A further benefit is that the bike supposedly packs into a suitcase or two, and would allow easier transport on future potential overseas bicycle adventures.

While continuing to waffle and watch classifieds, Bike Friday announced a 20% off sale for COVID, and that seemed a low-grade omen and reason to pull the trigger. The company, based in Oregon like fellow tandem maker Comotion (what’s in the water out there that puts everyone on tandems?!?!) offers a few standard builds, as well as the option to essentially build the bike to one’s exact configuration, using most commercially available parts.

I could add racks, custom wheels, a dynamo hub, and even pick the paint and cable color. I believe these options are available for Comotion as well, although Bike Friday seems to market their bikes as primarily “made to order” versus Comotion who seems to have a more establish dealer network and “off the rack” bikes in circulation.

I exchanged emails and calls with a gent named Peter at Bike Friday, who happened to have a young family and own a tandem himself, and was able to provide some helpful advice on the bike configuration. I also was able to provide measurements so they could tweak the frame to my specifications.

Perhaps the only wrinkle in the process, like all things these days, was the source of my 20% discount: COVID. Bike Friday provided an initial delivery estimate “by August at the latest,” which ultimately slipped to mid-October, presumably due to challenges in the supply chain as well as the silver lining of COVID: humanity suddenly realizing that bikes are a helluva lot of fun and buying every example available.

After about 7 months from plopping down some funds to an overburdened FedEx driver arriving at my door, I was finally able to open the surprisingly small box.

I worked my way through the rather extensive set of bubble wrap and zip ties, gradually amassing a collection of tubes, tires, and cables. The essential elements of the bike are already assembled, with derailleurs and brakes installed and cabled, bearings pressed, etc. Basically anything that’s fit together by hand remains the province of the end user.

As one would expect in the 21st century, a card directs you to an online installation manual and associated YouTube video. The YouTube link didn’t work directly, but I’m old school so I started with the manual and began fitting things together.

As I assembled the parts I noticed the paint was a little “rough,” and looked like it might have been the last job on Friday before happy hour. A couple of emails with Bike Friday and they agreed to repaint the bike once things had normalized a bit, which seemed like a satisfactory solution.

Assembly was fairly straightforward, and required nothing more than a 4mm, 5mm, 6mm Allen wrench, and a pedal wrench (or use your 6mm if your pedals have a 6mm socket on the spindle). Apparently Bike Friday will supply these tools if you purchase the travel case, but if you’re buying a folder I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect one would have these tools.

There was one basic potential area to mess up, which was installing the bottom mid-tube, which I installed backwards, only to realize the error of my ways when the cables were flopping in the breeze as the cable mount meant to provide tension was on the wrong side of the bike, a 5 minute fix (you can see the tube is backwards in the image below).

The rest of the assembly consists of mounting seat posts, bars, seats, and pedals. Again nothing too difficult. With the bike assembled, I took a maiden solo voyage around the block, just to get a basic feel for the bike before adding my copilot.

After 300+ miles on my loaded tourer, the bike felt “different,” with more sensitive steering and that indescribable but neither good nor bad “folder” feel. If you’ve never ridden a folder, there’s a slight strange feeling of not having anything in front of you as you’re missing the front triangle and steerer tube that’s usually between your legs, and the expance of wheel. I’d equate it to taking a ride in my grandfather’s 1970’s Cadillac where there were miles of hood in front of the driver, and then switching to a modern compact car, where it suddenly felt like your face was on the pavement.

The other big surprise was that the bike felt nimble and almost too “normal.” It didn’t feel like I was towing another set of bars, saddle, pedals, etc.

 Satisfied I’d performed assembly correctly enough that the bike wasn’t going to catastrophically disassemble, I added my daughter to the mix. We planned which foot we’d “launch” from, called out a countdown, and shoved off. Once again, the bike felt fairly normal. There was an additional heaviness with the added passenger, and I’d occasionally feel a bit of extra push or drag on the pedals, but as we both giggled in glee while riding around in a circle everything seemed rather normal, and interestingly after our first lap naturally figured out how to balance in conjunction with each other rather than acting independently. I could finally see why “tandem nerds” referred to themselves as “teams.”

We embarked on a full tour of the neighborhood, each time completing a loop and glancing at each other and nodding “again” as a question and statement.

After several laps and bemused glances from the neighbors, I swapped stokers for my older son, who had been waiting as patiently as a 10-year old can. It was there I discovered my first wrinkle to tandem life. My son launched from a stop much like he would on his mountain bike, using the handlebars as a lever to swing himself onto the saddle.

I’d not tightened the quick release for my saddle to Hulk-level, and his force twisted my seat post several degrees off center. This created the wildly strange sensation of my saddle shifting as I sat down, unbeknownst to me, while the bike was simultaneously going from a stop. This created a unique and unexpected situation as I sat and faced the direction my body intuitively thought it should go, but instead the bike started going in a slightly different one. My natural reaction was to slow my pedaling and “debug” the situation, but my son was in full mash mode, so the pedals kept turning, sending my mind reeling as everything 3+ decades of bicycling told it should be happening was seemingly not occurring. Assuming something was horribly wrong so I called a stop, and was somewhat relieved a fairly mundane issue like a slightly loose quick release had created that unsettling feeling.

The obvious next stage of the game was to add my smallest child to the mix, and hook up our Chariot trailer. I strapped in the 5-year old, had my daughter return to stoker, and pushed off around the neighborhood to more laughs and funny looks, again rather surprised how normal and stable it all felt. The only clue that I had a whole bunch of additional bike, a trailer, and two other humans occured when I went to slow down, and double the force seemed to be required to achieve an expected amount of braking force. I’ve long been sold on disc brakes, and in this case they almost seem mandatory.

Aside from the paint and a minor cross-thread in a pedal, the bike seems incredibly stable and strong. I also received racks and fenders that I’ve not yet installed, so I fully expect that this bike will live up to Bike Friday’s claim that it will quite happily serve as a trusty steed for loaded touring, and I’ve seen several trip journals and photos attesting that I’m not the first to make such an assumption.

I’m planning to take this crazy contraption on a slightly more significant ride than just around the block, and also need to try to folding function, but so far it feels like this clown will fit right into our circus.