When I first saw the cover photo you just witnessed, I had so many questions I just couldn’t help but find out what was going on. After all, it’s not every day that you see a bike “broken” in half and sold as an industry benchmark.

What you’re looking at is a design and hitch system that lets you take your bike apart like it’s built from a Lego part and transport it around while taking up as little space as possible. The company behind this system is Bicycle company n ° 22, a team of bicycle makers, designers, engineers and craftsmen with the aim of creating high quality titanium bicycles; that’s what the ’22’ stands for in their name, the atomic number of titanium.

However, this new hitch system is not limited to just one bike from this crew’s lineup and can be applied at all levels, clearly only on # 22 rides. As mentioned, the idea behind it was to reduce a full-size bike to an easily transportable package that can fit in a suitcase.

To achieve this, # 22 created the hitch system you have in front of you. Simply put, the top tube and down tube separate and separate the bike in the middle. Now coupler systems exist, but # 22 sought to keep things simple, creating a system that requires nothing more than an Allen key to assemble.

All you have to do is drive the wrench into a screw head, give it a few turns, remove the bolt, and the frame breaks. From there, the only other thing you have to worry about is disconnecting the internally routed brake line.

In order for this system to work smoothly and effortlessly, the No.22 also had to redesign the brake lines. In doing so, they have developed a “Brake Break” function which decouples the brake line as easily as the frame, by turning the wrist.

Now a question that came to my mind was how safe this system can be. Looking closely at the pairing zones themselves, with a bit of engineering knowledge you can understand that riding a bike with this feature shouldn’t trigger any alarms or signals as there is no room for your frame swivels or separates as you ride.

What the team also focused on was making this whole setup as seamless as possible. If you watch the video below and some of the pictures in the gallery, you can see how tight everything is once the bike is reassembled. If you run your hand over this segment, you shouldn’t feel any change.

Again, this specific coupler is only available for # 22 machines. Just to get an idea of ​​how much you’ll need to spend to get one, some of their bikes can go up to $ 12,000 (€ 10,240 at current exchange rates) depending on what kind of drivetrain you request.

Frankly, if they ever choose to sell the rights to this system, they could make a lot of money for the company. Heck, after seeing this idea in action, I felt my own bike needed a system like this. Just think about the things you can do with a bike that can be broken down into a few main parts.