Unwrapping the Velosock and holding it in your hands feels like you are holding on to a giants brightly coloured boxers. Getting it on the bike is a little fiddly, but not difficult. You’d probably be better off doing it outside your home, because the process is likely to displace some of the dirt you are looking to keep off your clean floor.
The finished result is a bicycle wrapped in a sock. Whether it looks good or not is the eye of the beholder. Personally, I quite like the quirky design.
The founding team, based out of Latvia, suggest three uses for the Velosock:
- After daily rides for storage in the home and office
- Carrying a bike on public transport
- Inside a car
The sock will definitely help keep grease off objects surrounding your bike and any mud is kept contained within the sock. Unfortunately, if you are looking for a solution for after a rainy ride, the Velosock is likely to disappoint as it isn’t waterproof, so any water will soak through and on to the floor.
Fortunately, you can machine wash the Velosock and it’s quick drying, so it’s easy to keep it clean.
It’ll fit bicycles with a length of 1.6m to 2m and there is also a kids edition.
With the practicalities summarised, is this something you’d want in your home or office?
The Velosock comes in a variety of different designs and there is even the option of ordering a custom design, if you are looking for a unique gift. The options are listed on the Velosock website and depending on the version you choose, the price can vary from £39.99 to £64.00. Shipping to the UK is free.
As a personal preference, I quite like how my naked, sock-less bike looks, so it’s probably not something I’d use. However, I can see how it could be a useful addition to help someone keep their home/office/car clean.
How flexible is it? The photos make it look quite taut. We ‘jigsaw puzzle’ our bikes together with the pedals aimed to go through the gaps so they are as narrow as possible (2 or 3 bikes depending on what is in use. This might be a nice way to make the outside bike harder to catch yourself on as you walk past. But not if it means they can’t interlock.
On my bike it still had a fair bit of give and I could wrap it beneath the pedal if I chose to.
Would be brilliant if waterproof. I can see a home made ripoff on the cards!
Agreed – gave it a test run here with some water and it went straight through. Guess it would be tricky to pull off waterproofing.
To protect bike from rust Velosock indoor cover isn’t waterproof. If Velosock would be waterproof then your bike would get rusty very fast, because water will stay in the cover. Now, if you put a wet bicycle in a Velosock, water will be absorbed by fabric which will get dry very fast.
Waterproofing would work the way other waterproof materials work, but inside out, so to speak. Can’t be that difficult, surely?
I think the problem arises that with the bike touching the ground, it’s easier for water to travel through. Where as waterproof works best when there’s a gap. (Again, not a material design expert, so just commenting on anecdotal evidence).
Velosock isn’t waterpfoorf to protect bike from rust. As Velosock isn’t waterproof water doesn’t stay in cover but absorbs by fabric.
I can actually see a market for this in Japan. I recently went there for a two month tour and we had to take a couple of trains. As wonderful as Japanese trains are, you can’t take your bike in them unless it’s packed/fully covered. It might have to do with their obsession with hygiene and not bothering others but really annoying (especially when you realise that in some trains they still have smoking boots! Tear them down and make space for bikes!)
It was a real pain to spend one hour before and after each ride taking the bikes apart, packing them into our Ground Effect Tardis bags (recommended for touring + flying), carrying them, plus a couple of panniers, a trailer and a 3 year old boy into the platform (no luggage trolleys on their stations so back pain guaranteed for a week), and then putting the bikes back together at the other end.
With something like this, we might have got away with rolling the bikes to the platform and just wrapping them before getting them into the train.
Nice – thanks Carlos – a good suggestion for anyone visiting Japan with their bike.
That’s why I travel with a folding bike. I gave up on regular bikes for that very reason.
If you’re trying to keep your carpet clean/ dry when bringing in a bike, wouldn’t it be cleaper and simpler just to use a length of carpet offcut?