No, that isn’t a pile of tubing and components that will eventually be fabricated into a rideable bike. It is actually a complete 27.5″ trail riding hardtail (minus the wheels of course) that will unfold and be ready to ride in about 90 seconds. The brainchild of Austrian designer, tinkerer, and framebuilder Thomas Schwaiger, the East folding bike was conceived originally as a way to take a proper mountain bike and stick in inside of a backpack so that he could haul it along when he went paragliding. A few optimized generations later and the current bike has adapted to provide stiffness on par with an aluminum full-suspension bike and breaks down so small that it can be easily transported anywhere you want to go, then stored out-of-the-way when you get back home…
And that is the bike in its unfolded form. This 26″ blue bike is a slightly earlier iteration with more cross country aspirations and a rigid fork, but after putting in thousands of kilometers off road Schwaiger, or rather Tonkel Om as he is more often called, has moved forward to building the bike into something of an all-mountain trail hardtail that can take on any style of mountain bike riding when paired with a suspension fork. We didn’t talk much about geometry as the bike is still in a prototype form, with a few more months of testing before it more-or-less goes live in the spring of 2017.
What we mostly focused on was the folding. 90 seconds from a bike to a pile of parts is a bold claim, but Tonkel Om could do it in about half that. The longest amount of time seemed to actually be pulling the wheels off and setting them aside (even with QRs.) Then when the bike is resting on the fork with the rear triangle in the air, you simply unhook the DT Swiss RWS seatpost clamp that hold it all together and pull the seatpost out.
Note that the bike has a pretty beefy looking alloy post. It is essentially the linchpin that holds the entire bike together, so no skimping on material there. Big thick and aluminum seemed to be a wise option.