Folding Bike Pedals Design

What's the Future of Folding Bike Pedals?

I commute with my bike very often. Sometimes parking my bike upsets me because the limited space for bicycles makes my bike tangle with others. For most of the time it was the pedals which get stuck into the wheels of other bikes. So I wonder. I wonder how to make a set of pedals that provide better user experiences.

No Hands! That Might Help.

Folding bike pedals are already out there in the market. There are actually whole bunch of different options for cyclists to choose. Saturated? Maybe, maybe not. Not until I discovered that all existing pedals could only be folded by using hands, which doesn't make sense to me at all. Pedals are where you put your feet on, and they are sometimes dirty because of weather or other factors.

The Opportunity

After seeing many existing pedals, I mapped them out in a simple 2x2 chart and quickly found a white space for making folding pedals slim. And yes, no hands.

Thinking About the Structures

I made sketches of various folding structures and mock them up quickly with foam-core boards to test the structures.

3D Printing Tester

After few quick mockups with foam-core boards, I moved to CAD and printed the selected one to test the structure. In this particular structure, there is no need to use hands for folding up the pedals. Simply with a kick on the side, the pedal folds just like magic. I imagined.

Final Technical Drawing

After some refinement on dimensions and structure, the final technical drawing was generated in Solidworks. To assemble the parts, standard sizes of screws and rivets are considered.