berlinonaut
Veteran
- Location
- Berlin Germany
Take it with a grain of salt, because the usefulness of this accessory really depends from your bike and needs. It was originally invented in 2013 by a small business from Italy, Addingsolutions under the name Eazygoing and sold via their webshop in two versions: A stainless steel one at around 100€ and a lighter titanium one at around 140€ (if I remember correctly, maybe it was even 190€). It was basically their only product. They failed to get market traction and the Eazygoing kept being almost unknown, barely available and possibly barely sold.
Not too much later, already in 2014, probably only one year after Addinsolutions entering the market with their product, a taiwanese company, Bikefun, started to sell a 100% shameless aluminium clone of the product on their webpage. Shameless in the sense that they even frankly admitted on their webpage having copied the original. Quote:
The concept were from www.addingsolutions.it/.
The cost of the bar was 96 EUR. BIKEfun found out that the product could be improved both on weight and price. After months of testing with our CNC factory partner, BIKEfun made our own product with better quality and with lower price.
The aluminium version was sold around 100€, so not really cheaper. Addingsolutions silently went out of business in around spring 2016 while Bikefun kept selling it's copy.
The webpage of bikefun has since then changed massively from a small Brompton accessory shop to something bigger and somewhat different but they still do offer the product: https://goods.ruten.com.tw/item/show?21402187381940 (just that they no longer admit that they stole the product from someone else)
Only a couple of months ago a myriad of copies of that copy suddenly popped up on amazon and ebay for around 30€. Somebody seems to have recognized the bikefun thingy, copied it, scaled up a cheap production run and and is flooding the market with copied under different names with no relation to the original inventor. So what you buy today is a clone of a clone - a typical sad story of stealing other people's ideas.
I had been curious about this thingy already for a long time but failed to order the Addingsolutions one before they went out of business because it seemed interesting but not too important, the more at the relatively steep price of 100€ and w/o ever having seen one. In mid 2016 I was in Barcelona and stumbled upon the owner of a Brompton shop who had one fitted to his personal electrified Brompton to balance out the weight of the battery in the front bag better. He was also selling the Bikefun version in his shop and so after fiddeling around with it I bought one.
I put it on one of my Bromptons and while it clearly gave more side stability when rolling it quickly turned out that there are some massive downsides that for me overruled the advantages by far. I did a write-up in autumn 2016 including pics. The text part is in German but Google translate will probably be able to give you an idea of the content:
http://www.bromptonauten.de/phorum3/read.php?1,29861,29861#msg-29861
In short: On a Brompton w/o rack in day to day use the thing proved to be far more annoying than useful and as a consequence I removed it after a short while and it has been sitting in the parts repository for a long time since then. On a bike with rack the side stability when rolling is much less of an issue (though it still is to a degree) and I did not try it out there. Last winter I was tinkering with a Brompton project which had one of those mini-racks from Asia and mounted it onto this bike. In this combination it worked pretty well and was (in opposite to the situation on the L-Brompton) not in the way and not annoying. Clearly not necessary and in my eyes not worth the 100€ I paid for it but at least it worked and added a bit of a benefit (along with a bit of weight).
With the situation now where the thingy dropped in price to way less than a third of what I paid it may be of interest albeit not necessary - but only for a bike with a rack. And only if in the process of cloning the clone product they did not miss on build quality or construction details (both of which I don't know). Apart from the fact that I personally do not like the idea to buy from thieves of intellectual property (which in this special case is mildered by the fact that the original inventor has gone out of business already years ago and the product that has been cloned here has been a clone itself...).
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). It will stand up ok with normal Easy Wheels, but the extending wheel just makes it a bit more stable.
