All about bicycles, electric-assisted bikes, technology and safety in the press

In our daily work as we deal with bicycle safety, technology and user manuals we come across lots of safety risks. The most frequent ones are published in articles of the leading German special-interest magazines TOUR – Europas Rennrad-Magazin Nr. 1, BIKE – Das Mountainbike Magazin Europas Nr. 1 and E-Bike – Das Pedelec-Magazin to make this information important for the sector accessible to a wider public.

For many years now the Eurobike Show Daily accompanying the annual international Eurobike Show has given us the opportunity to publish our perspective on major developments in the cycle industry in full-page articles.

We also speak regularly in independent lectures about all topics relating to bicycle technology and bicycle market. In addition, we are regularly cited by further special-interest magazines or trade journals as well as more and more by radio and television and in their media reports, which shows us that we are completely right with our information. The section NEWS informs you about the latest news from our specialist fields. The reports and publications of this section are listed chronologically or according to topics of interest.

BIKE 01/2016

Editorial: Of men and machines

It was supposed to be "THE institution in terms of critical neutral consumer advice". That's was BIKE founder Uli Stanciu wrote about the test in BIKE in the mid 90ies. Until today, nothing has changed; there is no other special interest magazine worldwide that makes such an effort to carry out bicycle tests.

One thing is clear, whoever wants to rate products, must be able to make differentiations. Whereas other magazines often find modest phrases, BIKE supply their readers with facts, scores and marks. It is a matter of fact that for this purpose you cannot only rely upon the impressions of the test riders. Manufacturers invest huge amounts of money into the development of their products, at the same time the optimisation potentials shrink. To determine even marginal differences, our test laboratory has been equipped with state-of-the-art technology from the beginning. In our test laboratory the test procedure for every bike takes six to eight hours, i.e. with nearly 200 mountain bikes tested per year, these tests produce enormous costs and are highly time consuming.

To keep pace with the development in the industry, our measurement and test procedures are improved continuously. Today, we’ve made another great step forward. With a weight of nearly one ton a test monster called Triceratops represents the centrepiece of the new BIKE test. Zedler-lnstitut für Fahrradtechnik und -Sicherheit invested three years into the project. With their bundled technology the Triceratops allows us different measurements on a single test stand: the spring characteristic curves and the characteristic curves of the fork, the wheel trajectory curves and the stiffnesses of the front frame triangle and of the rear frame.

(...)

Author: Josh Welz, chief editor

If you want to read the entire article, order the respective issue from Delius-Klasing-Verlag or (if it is sold out) send us an addressed and pre-paid envelope (DIN A4) and 3.00 Euro in stamps together with a short note indicating which article you are interested in.

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