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Under 5'4 and under 125lbs? Have we got a bike for you...
See a Photo Gallery of me tooling about with the new Pro Petite!
MORE AND MORE women (and compact men) are discovering the Bike Friday Petite series of road, touring and recreational bikes specifically designed for the smaller American woman.
We all know the Bike Friday was built as a performance folding bike / collapsible bike / travel bike - whatever you care to name it, but the small wheels make it, by definition, the perfect bike for the scaled-down rider.
The Petites started with a small prototype for Kelsy, the 13-year old daughter of BF evangelist Jeff Linder.
Theresa Scholz then rode a 17lb Petite Air Friday in Cycle Oregon 2002 , a 6-day, 70-100 mile a day affair - and her first major event by bike.
Just recently, I was asked to demo a canary-yellow Pocket Rocket Pro in a Time Trial at Round*Up in Philly, and at the Sutherlin Memorial Day Weekend . Now, having not ridden drop bars for 15 years, I was a little hesitant. But now I am hooked - so much so, I would consider touring the paved and semi-paved world on this little dynamo and hitching a ride when the mud got thick.
The bike is incredibly fast, and feels extremely stable standing and peddling - once I got use to the feeling of these bars compared to the H-bars on my Crusoe .
The Bike Friday road bikes are what really separate a BF from most other folding bikes - the bike is solid, sprightly, and feels just like my very nice (for its time) Viscount Sebring road bike from when I was 13 - an aluminium wonder with column shifters that cost an exorbitant $A175 almost 20 years ago (my brother's Peugeot wa $75). But the Pro fits me a whole lot better.
The 451 wheels feel even faster than my 406's with the Stelvio Kevlar 1 1/8" tires I've been raving about forever - so the moral to the story is, if you want to go fast, first and foremost, get a 451-wheel Bike Friday. That is, one of the road models.
Because we were in a hurry I did not get time to get the stem sized right - this bike normally come with the Bike Friday custom ultralight fit stem program - we simply found one that was about right and painted it for the events. Having ridden it 60 miles back from Sutherlin to Eugene I probably need a slightly shorter stem made. Of course, getting the stem right is all part of the fitting program offered with every custom Bike Friday!
This demo model is also the first one to be fitted with Shimano's new Capreo 9-tooth cogs, that Fred the BF Parakeet chirped about - which means little wheeled bikes can now have ALL the gears of the big wheeled bikes without needing to use the big front chainrings. See the photo gallery (link below).
What makes the Pocket Rocket Pro a Petite?
- It is constructed of thinner, lighter tubing - It has a smaller 1 1/8" headset compared the normal 1 1/4" headset - lighter wheel set options - that is, lighter rims and spokes. - Several women-specific components are available, like shorter cranks (165 down to 140 mm, as opposed to the normal 170-175 mm), special inserts to make brake levers more accessible to smaller hands, special smaller-scale drop bars, and so on.
Read more about the Petite Series .
Shortcut to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2l392
For more information, follow this link http://www.bikefriday.com/petites.