Ahhh! Lake Constance. Home of Eurobike; a particular field where we usually camp, and of course, loads of weird bike stuff. Here are some of the things that caught out eye this year. There’s also, thankfully, always good coffee courtesy of Thule, and some of the other stands were competing for best barista this year too.
The coffee and the view about cover the wonderful. What about the weird? How about…
An e-Penny Farthing!? Yes, that is a 20 inch wheel with a hub motor, and we’re guessing a throttle on the bars since it’s not hooked up to the pedals. Can it do wheelies? Would you dare?
Something caught our eye wandering by the BH Bikes stand:
It’s a 3D printed prototype bottle, using Fidlock’s attachment system. Frame design can’t accommodate a bottle? No problem! Just print a bottle to fit the frame (you could even fill the entire front triangle with a giant frame bottle).
This person in an ABUS foam costume was pretty intense, and not even slightly unhappy to be papped like this…
However, they insisted on having a proper photo done, communicating so entirely through mime.
Wearing a foam costume to promote things is a job everybody in the office has avoided so far. Many years ago, one of us did have a close shave with a giant costume of this ilk connected to a nightclub bar job, but the costume was unfortunately, and entirely accidentally, shoved into a bottle bin then never seen again.
We do hope these images aren’t giving Mark ideas.
Normally, the courtyards and inter-hall spaces at Eurobike have a bevy of garage inventors’ wacky new propulsion methods that are sort-of-pedalling-but-not. Every one of them is presented as a thing that will change the entire bike industry as we know it, yet funnily enough, never do. There weren’t so many things like that this year, and we’re not sure why. Curation by the organisers? Kickstarter fatigue?
E-bikes were absolutely everywhere this year though. In fact, they could have called it EUROBIKE, but with letters crossed out like this: EUROBIKE. Most were your run of the mill town bikes, commuters and mountain bikes, but these Rayvolt luxury beach cruisers were among the oddest.
Not only are mag wheels back again, they’re carbon fibre this time. Wil caught up with Bike Ahead, which you can read about here.
This Italian company had some interesting branding:
This is a carbon fibre hardtail ebike with a downhill fork, cross country tyres, and a Brooks saddle. Perhaps the Rough Stuff Fellowship have sent this back from the year 3000.
At the very end of Eurobike, this colour scheme from triathlon oriented Airstreeem was rather challenging to look at:
Mainly, one of the things that greeted us at Eurobike this year was several days straight of torrential rain. It started doing this on the second morning of the show:
It didn’t really stop for two days, which is super fun with leaky tents and bike commuting. Still, it could have been worse for most of us: some of an ant colony on the camping field decided that Chipps’ tent would be the perfect place to shelter above the waters, so they gathered in a little ball inside the rolled up inner door. Which, just as Chipps went to bed, created a perfect moment of “putting the door down, going to slee – ANTS! ANTS EVERYWHERE IMMEDIATELY”. The rest of us just got a little bit damp as we listened to the thunderstorms drumming on our tents for the night. Next morning, the campsite bar was full of thousand-yard stares.
The previous evening, we’d also discovered a bike commuting doctrinal difference, splitting the team 50/50. On realising the rain wasn’t going to let up as we prepared to ride back in the evening, half of us busted out things like emergency ponchos, the other half thought “Right, time to get naked! I can probably shift gears with this borrowed umbrella in my mouth”. We’ve put black bars on this image just to make it look a bit wronger:
Antony: “You look like an Avant Garde synth duo, a walkabout act at a terrible festival, or a religious cult that’s just about to fizzle out”. We’ll take synth duo!
Stay tuned for part two of Eurobike’s weird and wonderful. We promise there’ll be no more photos like the one above.