“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”
―
My Xootr Swift Folding Bike, Huffhines Park, Richardson, Texas
I had a tough winter – my allergies, despite my best efforts, knocked me out. The worst part of it was I have not been able to ride my bike as much as I wanted to and have lost a lot of fitness. So now I’m working on the long road back.
One thing that I have found is that I especially enjoy riding my bike if I have a destination. It’s no good to always be riding to a store or a restaurant or a brewery… so sometimes I create my own destination. For the three day holiday weekend I decided to get up as early as I can (which is not always particularly early), pack up what I need, and then ride out to some spot where I can stop for coffee, breakfast, read my Kindle, and maybe write a bit. I decided to ride my Xootr Swift folding bike – it is perfect for short rides.
I didn’t plan on riding very far, maybe five miles or so around the ‘hood, the weather is already getting hot, the wind hard from the south – but otherwise it was a beautiful day.
The only problem with this plan is the amount of stuff that I have to put together for such a simple thing.
- Thermos of coffee
- Bottle of iced water
- Breakfast burrito
- Kindle
- Notebook
- Fountain Pen
- Phone
- Wallet
- Helmet
- Cycling Glasses with mirror
- Reading glasses (my cycling glasses aren’t bifocals)
And it goes on and on. It took a long time to get everything ready… too long… and I forgot some things. So now, I make a checklist, make a pack with what I can put some stuff together ahead of time. The best part, though, is to plan where I’m going tomorrow morning.
Stuff on a picnic table in Huffhines Park, Richardson Texas.
Bill Chance 
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Curious to know what clamp you used to make your Xootr Swift a 2x front derailleur?
I’ll answer this in both of your comments.
I ordered the kit with the Swift when I ordered it from Xootr. It’s a custom clamp – with a SRAM Altus derailleur and a Gripshift 3-speed shifter.
I was never able to get the shifter to work the way Xootr set it up – a bottom pull with the cable coming from above. The Xootr solution was to use a little pulley cable – but the angle was wrong and it had too much friction to shift. I simply routed the cable down and around the chainstay, used a piece of sheet metal to keep the cable from sawing through the stay. That works great.
Now that Swift parts are no longer available, I don’t know what I would do. It would probably be possible to machine a clamp that would fit the very wide downtube and hold a front derailleur. I would use a top-pull derailleur and simply run the cable to it.
I know this is confusing, I can send (and/or post) photos if you need them.