I woke up about an hour ago. I seem to have pollen problems that don’t bother me too much during the day but wake me up at night. So I am sitting here at my laptop with a cup of hot tea waiting for the allergy pill I just took to take effect. I guess this gives me some time to kill, so I have decided to write a review of our bikes and the places we ride them. This is a bit of a departure from what I usually write, but what does that really matter? This “review” will have photos to go with the text, which should make it more interesting to anyone who cares to read it.

Late last June a month or so after Diane and I arrived at Cool Breeze Village, (no we don’t live at Deer Creek Motorcoach any longer) we decided we needed to take a hike someplace other than our normal location; the Blue Ridge Music Center. The trail there is a bit steep and Diane didn’t want to tackle it this particular morning so we decided to take a long walk on the New River Trail. The NRT, as it is known by many, is a converted railway to bike path trail that runs for 57 miles from Galax to Pulaski, in the mountains of Virginia. It also has a spur that runs into Fries, Virginia along the New River.

We took about a two-mile walk from the Galax Caboose trailhead to a campground located on the trail before we turned around. We didn’t see a lot of other hikers, or many joggers, but we encountered a lot of bikers. Most of them when coming up behind us would announce “On Your Left!” which made us jump until we got used to it. I found that a ringing bell announcing their approach made me less jumpy. Now if a rider said nothing, that could be a bit dicey unless you could hear the bike behind us.

We managed to have a good walk, and the trail as it winds next to Chestnut Creek is very pleasant to be on. The riders all appeared to be enjoying themselves. This made me think it might just be time to quit being so stubborn and finally buy a couple of bikes. I had refused before because I didn’t want to bother with a bike rack. We own an inflatable kayak because we didn’t want to have to deal with a kayak rack, so why couldn’t we figure out a way to have bikes without the typical hassle of transporting them? Stowing two folding bikes in the back of our SRX seemed like the best possible solution.

Diane and I talked about it, and once we both decided we wanted a bike and no rack, I started researching folding bikes. While on the NRT, we saw a number of riders on them, all twenty inches, and all of them electric. We didn’t want either of those things. We are not electric bike people. We want the true bike riding experience and all the fun and the pain that comes with it. We wanted twenty-six-inch manually powered mountain bikes and at first, there did not appear to be many choices to pick from. Most well-known makers of bikes, like Cannondale, Trek, Schwinn, Giant, Specialized, and others do not make a twenty-six-inch folding bike, but they are out there.

I started by looking on Amazon, of course, I did. There are lots of them on their site, with a whole bunch of XYZ companies selling them. Most with names I had never heard of before. I also read, what I hoped would be impartial, reviews of twenty-six-inch folding bikes, with no ties to the places selling them. That turned out to be more difficult to do than it sounds. I discovered a couple, out of a whole lot of sites, that had reviews that seemed trustworthy, with accurate information about folding bikes. I was able to narrow my search down to three. I dismissed one of the bike makers right off, the number one reviewed bike, due to its extreme cost, starting from 800 dollars to over 2200 dollars. That was just too much for us to spend. Montague bikes are good but not for the small-budget-minded.

I discovered a large number of folding bikes on Amazon. That number is getting larger, and once I weeded out the electric ones, along with the cheap ones with very high shipping costs (over a hundred dollars), a couple of brands popped out at me. Eurobike and Xspec. Eurobikes are sold by many Amazon marketplace outfits and Amazon sells and ships some of them also. Amazon’s selling price is a bit higher but shipping is included. They are priced from 350 to 450 dollars. Not bad bikes according to Amazon reviews, which can be a bit caustic at times. It seems when someone doesn’t like a bike they are very expressive in that regard.

The Xspec bike is sold by Crosslinks, an exercise equipment company based out of California since 2015. They sell imported goods as most do, which holds down the price and sometimes the quality of a product as well. I thought that the latter was most likely true until I watched a youtube video review. This review was done by an off-road, mountain biker. He is the kind of biker that rides through streams, over rocks, hops roots, and goes places on his bike that I would not go to on my feet.

It was obvious that his bright yellow Xspec is a tough, well-made bike. Xspec bikes have a low price, which does not accurately reflect their true quality.

I should mention what features I was looking for in addition to the bike frame folding in half. I wanted 21 speeds, and even though 99 percent of the time we never use more than seven of our 21. The front set stays in second gear. But at the time I thought that is what I should have. I wanted disc brakes, which are, in my mind, a necessity for mountain bike riding in the mountains. I did not want twist shifters, thumb indexed controls are a must. I also wanted a full-suspension bike, the front fork should have shock absorbers and there should be one in the back as well. A bike with front shocks and none in the back is called a hard-tail bike and that is a proper name for it I think. The Xspec bike met all my requirements for a mountain bike, and most non-folding bikes add a lot more to the price for those features. The Montague Paratrooper is a hard-tailed bike and requires the removal of the front wheel in order to fold it. I don’t have a problem with steel-frame bikes, as opposed to an aluminum alloy one, or decals as opposed to full-frame paint jobs. Those are small things compared to decent shifters and brakes. The Xspec has all that I was looking for. The bike at the time came in both a black and a white model.

I bought two white ones from Amazon Marketplace for 299 dollars each (no kidding!) plus tax, price included shipping. Crosslinks sold it and shipped it and I received five percent back on my Amazon Store card. I found out later that if I had ordered directly from Crosslinks, the price is five percent less.

The first bike arrived about a week after placing my order. Amazon said that was it, the order was delivered. Not quite! There were two bikes, not one. I called the Crosslinks shipping office in Indiana, and a tech answered the phone right away. He provided me with a second tracking number, the bikes did not ship on the same day. Amazon didn’t appear to know that. The second bike arrived two days after the first one.

I assembled the first bike as soon as the box arrived. They are about forty percent assembled from the factory. From the main sprocket back you don’t need to add anything except the rear fender. That reminds me. Most mountain bikes do not come with fenders. By most I mean all of them. The fenders on our bikes are plastic, they mount to the front fork and the seat post and they basically float in mid-air. They do what they are intended for and that is to keep you from getting a “skunk” stripe down your back when riding down a wet trail. Not a pleasant thing to get when riding down a black coal dust trail, that is for sure. I had to unpack the bike from the box, and it is really wedged in with a ton of styrofoam. That is one of the things a buyer complained about in his review, that the bike was over-padded and he didn’t like filling his trash cans up with cardboard and styrofoam sheets. Really? How would he have liked having crushed spokes and scratches on the frame, along with a bike that is much easier to unpack from its box?

There is really no pleasing some people. One, in particular, comes to mind. Folding bikes have a bracket under the pedals, like a foot welded to the bottom of the frame. This provides a stand for the bike when it is folded, and keeps it upright. A good thing to have right? One buyer didn’t think so, he tried to cut it off, and when that didn’t work out well, he wanted a refund for his purchase. I don’t think that worked out well either, not when, according to him, shipping it back was going to cost him a hundred dollars. I think the bike is still in his garage.

I assembled the front fork, with all its bearing rings, and attached the handlebars. The shifters and brake calipers were pre-mounted. I had to assemble the front disk brake assembly and adjust it. That was a little tricky since I had not used disc brakes before. That was a two-person job. I held the bike up while Diane spun the front wheel for me. We had to do the same for the back brake and I needed to adjust the derailleurs. I had help from a friend of mine in the park for that job. I had not used index shifting before and was not experienced in making the necessary adjustments. Doug was and had both bikes working well in a very short time. He told me I would need to adjust them again because the cables on a new bike stretch when used and since they work by tension, well they may start to slip when shifting. That made sense to me and so I learned how to do it. I bought a rack that holds up a wheel for me which allows me to turn the pedals so I can make any adjustments I need to make, and there are a number of them.

Bike assembly, if it has all the components of an Xspec, is the number one gripe by any buyer that reviews their purchase on Amazon. Many folks who bought an Xspec bike complained bitterly using phrases like “this bike is trash!” and the parts are all plastic! Neither is true of course. They also complained about the installation manual not being easy to understand. That was true. At the time of my purchase, It was written for more than one model and all the diagrams didn’t match the bike. The video however that was on their website took care of that for me. The only thing I needed to see was how to mount the fenders. There were no instructions for that in the manual at all.

It is really simple. If you want a fully assembled and tuned bike you are going to pay at least 200 dollars or more for it and pick it up from a retailer. Buying one from Walmart at any price doesn’t count. I found that out when I had to tune three of them for my Son-in-law this past December. He bought one for each of his sons and one for his wife. All nice bikes, but put together just enough to get them into the store rack. My point is, if you don’t want to, or don’t know how to assemble a bike and don’t want to learn, then don’t mail order one. You should go to a retail bike store and buy one, except there won’t be any 26-inch folding bikes in stock to purchase. I had one bike store technician tell me there was no such thing as a 26-inch folding bike.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I own two of them.