Visiting Bike Friday

We were finally able visited the Bike Friday factory the other day when we went to Oregon for Made 2024.

First off, let me quickly introduce who they are.

Bike Friday is a bicycle company who specializes in folding bikes since 1992.

Their bicycles are all handmade in Eugene Oregon USA. Designing, welding, painting, assembling…pretty much everything is done by themselves in their HQ at Eugene.

As you can see by the few pictures of their bikes I posted, they feature 20 inch wheels, making the bike to be easily folded and become compact when doing so.

One of the coolest things about their bikes is that you can have it made based on your body size, since they are order made.

Founder Alan Scholtz, wanted to create a bike that he could fit in a suitcase and travel with, which was the start of the company.

Alright, let’s take a look at their factory.

We were greeted with a bunch of Bike Fridays as soon as we entered.

This gentleman is Mr. Walter Lapchynski, who handles almost everything around the factory.

He has the Chinese Character “忍” tattooed on his arm which means “patients” in Japanese. I thought this was the perfect tattoo for him since he is a hard working and patient gentleman who welcomed and gave us a full tour of the factory to people who barely speak English.

Ohhh, a Brompton carrier block mount.

What is this? Maybe a custom made front rack?

(I asked afterwards and found out it was a rack for the Haul-A-Day)

The Brompton carrier block is attachable to Bike Friday bikes, but what if we can install Bike Friday racks onto Bromptons…hmm

The Production of Bike Friday frames takes place in three big sections. Welding, painting and assembling.

There is one person in each of the cells to do their jobs for producing bike frames. They work in teams to build their bicycles rather than one builder doing everything which was quite interesting.

As we follow Walter, he took us deep into the factory.

He showed us the jigs of their welding.

They were all beautifully worn out.

They have two jigs, one for diamond shaped frames and one for mono-tube frames.

This is the assembly section.

Bike Friday frames has a unique construction, due to the folding mechanism, so they need to be put together by the employees.

The picture above is showing one of their employees attaching the main frame to the rear end.

Their bikes are built step by step like this.

(Finished frames hung up on he sealing)

This is when he is making some final adjustments after assembling the frame.

The decals are being applied and the headset is being installed.

Everything except some very small parts are all made in the factory in Oregon

There were loads of parts and tools in the factory, but they were all nicely organized and ready to use whenever.

This is how they manage their orders. They have these totes hanging on a rack, each tote having order sheets and the components needed for the build.

We should adopt this system because we always have a hard time sorting out orders.

As we move further into the factory, we reached their office, where we got to see many of their legacy bikes.

This is one of the leagacy bikes “Tikit”. They were still in production a few years ago, so I often see some of them here in Tokyo.

This is apparently the very first Bike Friday that was born in 1991, a year before they were officially “Bike Friday”

The tandem bike you see above is the bike that the Scholdz brothers made for a race event.

The Scholdz brothers had a time period when they were mainly making tandem bikes, so there were so many tandem bikes displayed throughout the factory.

Alan was also the founder of Burley, hence the Burley logo on the tandem frame.