Excited to ride with a Brompton

I used to be a road cyclist, but I wanted something more versatile for everyday use—like grocery runs or heading out to grab food.

During a trip to Japan this March, I found a great deal and picked up a T Line for around $4,600 USD. With help from the community, I went ahead and did a DIY upgrade to a 5-speed setup and swapped to a 44T chainring to better handle the rolling terrain where I live. Huge thanks to u/JofArnold for sharing upgrade experience, and to u/brilliantbikes for the step-by-step YouTube tutorials—they made the whole process much easier.

In just over a month, I’ve already put 185 km on the bike—actually more than my road bike (to be fair, a big part of that was for setup, fine-tuning, and testing :P). I’m really enjoying the T Line so far, and I hope it’ll be a bike I keep riding for decades.

As a side note, my bike’s serial number starts with 2412, so it’s not within the affected range of the "handlebar support and fork misalignment" issue. That said, when I checked the bolts, the third and fourth (per Brompton’s orientation) were noticeably under-torqued—each still had more than half a turn left before reaching 7Nm. I’ll be keeping an eye on these and checking the torque regularly going forward. Since this is safety-related, I’d recommend other riders either check it themselves or have a shop take a look.

Looking forward to many more miles on this setup. Happy to hear any thoughts or experiences from other T Line riders.