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

The most common safety risks that we come across in our daily work around bicycle safety, technology and operating instructions are also published by us in articles in the leading German special-interest magazines TOUR (Europe's road bike magazine no. 1), BIKE (Europe's mountain bike magazine no. 1), MYBIKE and EMTB in order to make this information, which is important for the industry, available to a wider public.

For many years now, the Eurobike Show Daily, trade fair magazine of the annual Eurobike Show, has also given us the opportunity to publish our view of major developments in the cycle industry in full-page articles.

We also speak regularly in independent expert presentations about all areas of bicycle technology and the bicycle market. In addition, we are quoted by further special-interest magazines of the industry and the trade as well as increasingly by radio and television in their media reports, which shows us that we are spot on with our advice. The section "News" informs you about the latest news from our specialist areas. The reports and publications of this section are listed chronologically or according to areas of interest.

TOUR 07/2003
Reading time 0:45 minutes

Missing the mark?

Lightweight, expensive, fancy: manufacturers discovered handlebars and stems to be fashionable trend parts. But is the chic stuff also technically mature? TOUR took eleven current combinations off the catwalk and tested them thoroughly.

Over ten years ago, the first threadless steering bearings appeared on roadbikes in Europe. The system’s potential, which became popular under it’s inventor’s brand name – Aheadset – remained undetected for a long time and was only very slowly accepted by the market. Meanwhile, hardly any roadbike is sold without the handy bearing anymore which has radically changed the bike in this field. Only threadless fork stems have allowed for handlebar, stem and fork to weigh less together than handlebar and stem before the age of Ahead.

Apparently, this has become a lucrative market, as manufacturers of handlebars and stems very frequently throw new, imaginative models on the market. They lure and advertise with precious materials like carbon or magnesium and sometimes cause confusion with new and non-uniform sizes – the idea of oversizing does not spare handlebars either.

(...)

Author: Dirk Zedler

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