Amongst the massive brands and product launches at Eurobike, there’s a lot of odd stuff too. Here’s a bit of what we saw:
The penny farthing of the future! As if Tron was written by Arthur Conan Doyle.Tufo had these great 29er tubular tyre rimmed tables on their stand.It looked like sandpaper on Fabien Barel’s controls, but one of us had the chutzpah to poke it, and found it’s actually soft rubber for his delicate little fingerywingeriesAbsoluteblack had a fine board filed with saddle/bar cowskulls…We especially like the blue one with straight horns.(Sorry about the – gasp – portrait format).
As part of the Scotland stand, Grease Monkey Cycles were there with their new public bike maintenance station prototype. It’s a lovely idea inspired by the cabled tools at the top of ski lifts; we especially like the prongs on the top that can act as a workstand.
This thing rolling around on eccentric pink mag wheels kept catching the corner of my eye for the whole show. The only time I managed to photograph it, two people were frantically doing maintenance on the rear wheelNot sure which party these logs were headed for, but given how late it was and how much beer was around, I bet whoever rode away with them wasn’t going in a very straight line.200mm bars: next year’s hot XC trend.Return of the mag?These 20 inch disc mag wheels were on what appeared to be a commuter bike.There were a lot of people whizzing around testing e-bikes in the outdoor areas, and this guy on a penny farthing whizzing through us peds.We first saw this fat cruiser, named the Circle Bike, in the car park at our campsite. It’s by Paris based designer Goudrand Antione.
The Circle Bike is one of the oddest designs we’ve seen in ages. Not made to fold, but it does pack down much smaller with some dismantling, and the wheels sitting either side of the frame. More details and images at goudrand.com
Only the finest cuisine for our Eurobike correspondents.
David started mountain biking in the 90’s, by which he means “Ineptly jumping a Saracen Kili Racer off anything available in a nearby industrial estate”. After growing up and living in some extremely flat places, David moved to Yorkshire specifically for the mountain biking. This felt like a horrible mistake at first, because the hills are so steep, but you get used to them pretty quickly.
Previously, David trifled with road and BMX, but mountain bikes always won. He’s most at peace battering down a rough trail, quietly fixing everything that does to a bike, or trying to figure out if that one click of compression damping has made things marginally better or worse. The inept jumping continues to this day.
I’ll fairly sure the absoluteblack stand is actually the tune stand!