Dahon Enters the Fold

I've been travelling a lot with my latest work project, back and forth to Michigan every week since this past fall. Of course, this presented a reason for N+1, so I decided I needed to pick up a folding travel bike. I spent some happy time researching various wheels sizes and folding mechanisms, trying to find a cheap bike that would fit my 6'3" self. Finally, during a slow moment in the Super Bowl, I somewhat impulse ordered a used Dahon Speed 7 off ebay. It came packed up in this odd box:

I should have take some "before" pictures, but it was pretty rough when I got it. A broken rear spoke (noted in the ebay ad), missing front fenders, sticky brakes, etc.

I bought a new spoke and a spare tube, adding $10 to my cost. I'm trying not to spend any money on this bike:

But here's what I ended up with:

AT-2 style handlebars give me room to move around. Surprisingly the reach is pretty comfortable for me, though the seat post isn't quite high enough at max extension. Some of the cheaper folders I looked at had the handlebars welded to the stempost, which makes such handlebar swaps impossible:

If I do spend some money on this bike, I'm thinking about replacing the stempost with an adjustable version. Mostly so the kids can ride the bike--Henry is quite taken with it (it and my Karate Monkey are the only bikes of my fleet that he cares about)

I also replaced one sticky brake lever (hence the mismatch), and replaced the cheap twist shifter with a thumbie.

I added my own seat and a seat bag. The wheels are bolt on, so I need to carry a 15mm wrench everywhere.

I removed the rear fender to stop a persistent rub, and added my tiny pump to match the tiny wheels:

The rear derailer has a strange forward pivot, and it's reverse action. I'm finding this pretty easy to get used to. Rear wheel removal, however, is awful, worse than trying to remove a wheel from a bike with track ends and gears. When I was reinstalling the rear wheel after fixing the spoke and adjusting the rear hub from its nearly frozen state, I ended up removing the derailer to get the wheel in.

This picture also shows the shim I made to install the seat QR clamp--the bike came with a bolt on clamp, a sad feature on a bike where you want to quickly drop the seat for folding. The spec 39mm clamp is tough to find, so I ordered a $3 40mm clamp from ebay and shimmed it. Without dropping the seat, it only folds to this:

The bike is called the "Speed", but the name is clearly more aspirational than descriptive. This is the slowest bike I've ridden in a long time. It feels like I'm constantly working just to maintain a pace on flat ground. Like I'm fighting a constant headwind. I expected the nervous, darty handling and the significant flex in the stempost, but the absolute slowness of this bike is a big disappointment.

My initial reaction is to blame the small wheels. They have to spin around much more for a given speed, magnifying any hysteresis loss from the tires. Maybe better tires would help, but I'm reluctant to invest even $50 or so to try this theory out. However, since Henry does like the bike, and it's not worth much to sell, and folders are a tough sell anyway, maybe it makes sense to invest a bit more and see how if it improves.