Fellow Swift lovers,

I've had my Xootr Swift for about a month, and I absolutely love the bike. I live in New Jersey and take it with me on NJ Transit and Septa to NYC or Philadelphia for weekend rides, and I feel a lot more comfortable getting on a crowded train with the Swift than I did with my non-folder. As a bike too, it is a beautiful little machine, by far the best bike I've ever had. I get lots of comments about the bike. A fellow cyclist called out to me yesterday: Is that a Brompton? He was wrong, but surprisingly folder-literate!

I bought the bike at Trophy Bikes in Philly, which sponsors a kind of folder convention once a year, the Fold-up I think they call it. I got to ride some really great bikes there, including the Brompton, the Birdy, the Bridgestone Moulton, Bike Friday, etc. Peter and Karl both made presentations about the Swift, the design of the bike and little of the background of how their collaboration began at the Fold-Up, and a Swift owner gave a demo of how he packs his Swift up in a bag to sneak it into his workplace. After thinking it over for a few months, making a couple of trips back to Trophy (and saving the $$), the Swift edged out the others.

Anyway, I have a mechanical question for you Swifters (from your posts, I know 99% of you are more mechanically "swift" than I am). I am constantly adjusting the quick-release levers for the seat post. I have to set them extremely snug -- about as tight as I can manage -- or the seat post sinks down during the ride. This adds a bit of fiddling -- oh, now it's too tight; dang, now too loose -- to the set up each time I ride, and it's a little frustrating. I shouldn't be testing the physical boundaries of the mechanism; I weigh 145 pounds. Setting it very snug should be enough. Could it be that my seat post is the wrong length? Let me to try explain a bit more.

When I unfold the bike and push the seat post in, the post goes down a certain distance before it catches, at which point it could rest there or you could use a bit more force to push it in a couple more inches. However, the initial catch point is actually a little bit -- say, a half inch -- too low for me, so I have to pull the seat post out a bit. This requires that I use 2 hands to set the seat height, one to hold the seat up to work against gravity and the other to work the quick release; if I pushed the post a bit farther down into the range where it catches, I could manage the seat post stuff with one hand (since while in the "catching area" the post will stay in position while I work the quick release). For this reason alone, I probably would want a longer seat post. But would this help with the up-down stability problem as well? Does being in the catching area help keep the post in place, even when the quick release levers are closed?

Thanks in advance. Sorry for the long message, but I wanted to introduce myself as a happy Swift owner and to explain this little problem with what is already one of my prize possessions.

John