Couldn’t see this had been done. Poor lad/family. 6 year old boy died after being impaled on his bar ends.

Grips looked a bit of a mess. Always makes me cringe when I see people without proper bar ends but people just don’t realise how much damage they can do.

Boy, 6, dies after being impaled on the jagged handlebar of his own bike

My cousin core sampled himself at an early age, did OK thankfully. It’s bad when I see racers try and cover it up too

Very sad . DMC and Hoffman had a near fatlal  crash when a barend fell out. Really easy to end up nasty injury.

They’rectalking about end caps rather then bar ends – but surely no handlebars in the history of cycling have had a serrated end?

Couple of crashes or just dropping the bike on the ground would sharpen it and leave it with an uneven ‘serrated’ like finish. Especially on steel bmx bars which have thinner walls.

Sad story, poor little fella. I’ll bet that unless you have experience of this, non-cyclist parents wouldn’t even have picked up on the danger.

I think the father is looking to take Trek to court looking at how he states this is from normal operation and it being in America.

An uneven finish is not the same as a serrated finish. BMXs I had back in the day would have a rounded end to the bars – being flung on the ground tended to smooth off any sticky-out bits, rather than grinding then to the sharpness the story suggests.

Surely this problem could be eliminated by design, perhaps led by legislative safety standards? It seems daft to be relying on plastic end caps or rubber grips which are both prone to failure?

Tragic story. Wasn’t it derek starship on here who empaled himself many years back?

End caps are important, and as franksinatra says, a safety design should be built in with cheap bikes without lock-on grips.

(and yeah, bar ends are a different thing)

An uneven finish is not the same as a serrated finish. BMXs I had back in the day would have a rounded end to the bars – being flung on the ground tended to smooth off any sticky-out bits, rather than grinding then to the sharpness the story suggests.

Just look at the pictures and stop arguing over pointless points. Its a bar that’s been dropped a few times roughing it up a bit.

I read the story during lunch, then the next thing that came into the workshop was a wee kids bike for a puncture repair. Both grips had slipped inwards, and the cheap steel bars had been badly scuffed up on the end, leaving a deadly sharp, literally serrated edge 😳

Safe to say I put bar plugs in, then reminded all other staff to keep an eye out for similar. The worst thing is parents just not noticing or realising that it’s an issue.

At our junior mtb club we often see kids turn up without end plugs, and parents unaware. The leaders carry a few spares. Tragic story, but not Trek’s fault (although a US court might think otherwise.)

Tragic and freak accident but you see so many apple corer bars when out and about. </span>

Best kids bike we have had for bar end protection has been the Specialised Hotrock. It had these lovely golf ball texture grips with rounded ends. Loads of rubber and the rounded ends meant they didn’t tear.

If I’ve not got lock ons then a closed ended grip with a plug inside. I often bulk the end plugs up with a bit of electrical tape so they’re an extra tight fit. Kids and Mrs g-d get same treatment.

Closest I’ve come to dying was in borrowdale. I was cycling at about 2 mph and mishit a rock. Bike ended up lying flat on the ground with the handlebars vertical. I took the end in the groin area as i landed. Luckily i had huge onza rubber covers on my bar ends (proper bar ends incidentaly OP). Despite this i had a lump the size of a half tennis ball by the time i stood up. It was proper proper scary. I had punctured the femoral artery but luckily with no actual route to the surface. So I just bled internally and ballooned.

Deeply scary walk back to the car and then hospital. You could see the imprint of the handlebar on my skin. If I hadn’t had such big soft rubber ends then I’d have been fully dead inside a minute.

For weeks afterwards my whole thigh and upper leg was fully purple as the blood found it’s way around. Took .months for the clot to dissolve.

I remember advice of putting a penny or other correctly sized coin inside the grip before sliding it on to stop this happening. I always did it when i started bike tinkering as a teenager.

Looking at that picture, it looks like the grip has been slid inboard as far as it can go. Hard to see how that would have happened in a crash. Also, not entirely clear from the story, but it sounds like he wasn’t actually “impaled” on the bars, just that he took a bar directly into the abdomen and it caused internal injuries, i.e. there was no puncture wound. If that’s the case, having bar end plugs fitted may not have made any difference.

Not much impressed with the bottle cage positioning either.

sorry yeah, bar end PLUGs

Looks like the bike has been dropped on the end of the bar quite a bit resulting in the end of the bar cutting through the rubber grip and then becoming damaged and jagged. The metal is often chamfered and sharp due to a pipe cutter necking it in during cutting.

While I don’t agree with suing I think there is a lesson to be learnt in safer design with some measure taken to stop a rubber grip failing like that. The coin trick above sounds spot on.