Diamant Handy Bike: The robust 26-inch folding bike
The chapter on folding bikes at Diamant begins in 1994. In this year, the first own folding bike was patented unter the name “Intra Frame”. This innovative concept revolutionised the way people looked at mobility and transport at the time. In this blog post, we take a look at the era of folding bikes at Diamant and introduce you to the Diamant Handy Bike in detail.
The first folding bike by Diamant
With the Intra Frame, Diamant brought a full-size 28-inch bike onto the market that could be folded to the smallest packing size. The handlebar and pedals could be folded in to make transport easier. The frame of the Intra Frame was made of steel and the bike was equipped with a 7-speed gear hub.
A folding bike can be easily and quickly transformed or disassembled into a compact format or into its individual parts using hinges, couplings, or clamps. This feature enables folding bikes to be easily transported on other modes of transport as hand baggage.
Today, folding bikes are a practical solution for people who live in urban areas or commute and are looking for a space-saving and mobile means of transportation. They offer a combination of compactness, comfort and functionality that makes them an attractive option for various applications. At the moment Diamant does not manufacture folding bikes. We recommend Brompton.
One year after the introduction of the Intra Frame model, it was comprehensively revised. The bike was marketed under the new name “Handy Bike”. Interestingly, Motorola’s first mobile phone with a flip-up display was launched at the same time. Whether this temporal proximity had an influence on the naming of the Diamant folding bike… that is still a dark area of speculation for us today. In any case, the Handy Bike was characterised by its user-friendly design and required no manual skills. Diamant even secured a patent for this innovative design:
- Step 1: Fold the handlebar and set the crank horizontally
- Step 2: Slide in rear wheel
- Step 3: Remove front wheel
- Step 4: Fold in the pedals and fold the frame
The Diamant Handy bike was a functional, robust and reliable 26-inch folding bike with an indestructible stainless steel frame that promised a particularly long service life. Assembly the bike was just as effortless as folding it, making it an extremely practical option.
Once folded, the Handy Bike had a pack size of 80×85 cm. There was a special bag for storage and transport. Like its predecessor, the Handy Bike also had a 7-speed hub gear and weighed around 14 kg. Back then, you could buy the Diamant Handy Bike without a Vodafone contract, but it was still very expensive. Around 1,999 DM was due for this bike.
No future for folding bikes at Diamant
The chapter on folding bikes at Diamant closed early. At the end of 1996, Hartwig Müller, the director at the time, left the company. When he left, the production of folding bikes was stopped. By this time, around 1,000 of these sophisticated and robust bikes had left the production on Nevoigtstrasse. But the era lives on. The Handy Bike is the only Diamant bike to have found its way into Cyclepedia, a unique collection of more than 250 bicycles by architect and designer Michael Embacher. Over several years, he has lovingly collected these and exhibited them worldwide. It is a tribute to the fastest, lightest, most innovative and inventive bicycles designed in the last century.