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Tuesday 28 February 2017

Book Review: Big Book of Cycling for Beginners



If you are new kid on the block of bicycling, this book will be a good companion to start explore the world of cycling. You can find almost anything you need to know to begin your journey. If you want to cycling, of course you need a bicycle. Nowadays, you can scratch your head when go to bikeshop. Maybe the first though in your mind was "Where's the right bike for me?", this book offering guidance for you to choose.



After that, you will find lot of info about how to properly dress up, choose the right community/club for you and many more. you can find tips about nutrition, how to carry things in your bike and about basic bike maintenance. This is a good book for beginner. They pack lot of information for beginner in one book. 



If you ok with black and white page and have a spare time to read, why don't try to read this book? For experienced cyclist, maybe you can finish this book in few minutes, but it doesn't hurt to add this book in your library right? You can use this boo to explain cycling to your family or your friend's,


Ride On!



Wednesday 22 February 2017

Counterfait Parts, Where Copyright Means Copy-Is-Right Final Part

Open Mold Frames



Aliexpress.com sells carbon bicycle frames. Amazingly, it also sells the clamshell molds needed to make these frames. Carbon cycle frames are baked in these molds. Despite modern non-tube carbon frames being called “monocoques,” they are not, in fact, made in one piece. They tend to be molded in two pieces, stuck together with glue, and then the joins are concealed with a carbonand- resin mix. Premium cycle brands pay competent factories for the creation of bike- and size-specific molds, and these molds are not used by other companies.

Competent and counterfait factories also produce generic “open-mold” cycle frames using molds that are, in effect, rented out to all and sundry. These Chinese-made open-mold frames are cheaper than proprietary frames from the premium brands. Open mold frames can be remixed by using different rear triangle or bottom bracket configurations leading to unique looking frames at a fraction of a cost of making an entirely new design. 



Chinese open-mold frames don’t have names; they have numbers: three digits after FM (FM stands for frame mould). So, FM099 is an open mold frame baked in “frame mould ninety nine”. FM099 is also a familiar looking shape – it looks an awful lot like the Specialized Venge. In short, it’s a knock-off, and is known online, wink-wink, as the “Fenge.” FM098, on the other hand, doesn’t encroach on any design rights – it’s a popular frame, available from consumer-direct from vendors such as HongFu and Deng Fu.

Chris Mei of VeloBuild, a Chinese trading company that sources and sells open-mold frames told BikeBiz that 30 percent of VeloBuild’s sales are to Europe, 65 percent to North America and five percent to Australia. Open-mold frames sometimes get a bad rap on internet forums – usually for issues with internal cabling and frame misalignments – but it’s important to note most of them are not fakes, they are no-name frames. Some open mold frames may have been built to very high standards with premium carbon. Others not. There’s no way of telling which is which, and generally very little comeback available.


Do They Crumple?



Manufacturers and brand owners like to claim that fake frames and parts are little better than papier-mâché and will, at some point, collapse. The uncomfortable truth for the industry is that despite YouTube videos that appear to show fake handlebars being crushed with biceps many fake frames and parts are actually almost as tough as the genuine articles; some are perhaps even tougher – it’s cheaper to over-engineer a product to make it strong than it is to use all sorts of clever computer programs and complex carbon pre-preg layups.

Even genuine products fail – the difference is that consumers who buy pukka products from bonafide retailers can rely on supplier warranties, and if the worst came to the worst the consumer can sue the locally-accountable supplier for any injuries caused by defective products. It would be far harder for a Western consumer to sue a reputable Chinese manufacturer directly, and next to impossible to sue the here-today-gone-tomorrow merchants buying from counterfait factories.

There are no figures available on how many injuries – or deaths – have been caused by fake products collapsing on riders. Nevertheless, it’s probable that it’s statistically less safe to ride with products made by factories with little interest in the latest ISO standards and even less interest in cycling itself. Genuine products may crumple, but they are usually designed so that in the unlikely event of a high-speed failure they crack or split in a relatively predictable way, with the rider hopefully being able to ride to a stop; fake products don’t benefit from the same sort of failsafe protocols.



According to Raoul Luescher of Carbon Bike Repair of Australia, common problems include:
  • Delamination – “where the plies are separated and can no longer transfer load.”
  • Unbond – “when the plies or other fittings were not bonded properly during manufacture.”
  • Porosity – “dispersed air trapped in the resin during cure causing a reduction in mechanical properties.”
  • Void – “large, trapped air bubble.”
  • Cracks – “broken fibres and/or matrix.”
The aerospace industry relies on composites. Every carbon part is tested for such problems, usually with nondestructive inspection (NDI) technologies such as ultrasound. The cycle industry doesn’t yet test every frame and part with NDI imaging methods. Luescher uses ultrasound equipment to work out where repairs to the matrix are required. “I am not aware of any of cycle factories doing any ultrasound scans of production frames or parts,” Luescher “Other technologies such as CT scans may be more likely to be used. Larger voids could be found like this. However, they would typically not be able to find porosity.”

“I have scanned some of the fakes, mainly Pinarellos,” says Luescher. “The compaction was mainly ok. There was some variability – some were better than others. However, you also can get this in the original brands as well. Overall the laminate was comparable from a porosity and void perspective. “The unknown is the fibre and resin quality, grade and type as well as the ply orientation. I would need to do destructive tests to identify these parameters.



The fakes were similar in weight and wall thickness and there was no sign of low-cost glass fibres in the scans. “I have seen some bars, forks and rims from the fakes all the way up to the very high-end brands that were full of porosity, voids and other flaws such as wrinkles, which could cause a catastrophic failure or at the very least reduce the life span of the part. “One thing that was noticeably different on the fakes was the poor quality of the headset bearing seats and other fittings.”

In the near future there may at least be a baseline for safety which is accessible by all, even the counterfait factories. Improvements are in the pipeline for the current international safety standard for bike frames and structural parts: ISO 4210. This is essentially a set of fatigue tests to tick off. The forthcoming changes aim to bring ISO 4210 up  to speed with composite materials, although whether counterfait factories will apply it any more diligently than they do the current version is open to debate.

One of the weaknesses of the existing standard is that it was developed before carbon became commonplace, and doesn’t take into account carbon’s very different build, use and failure characteristics. Experts from the cycle industry, testing laboratories, and trading standards bodies have been working on the composites-specific CEN Technical Committee 333 Working Group 8, or WG8 for short.

“The current fatigue tests are based on the properties of steel and aluminium,” says Peter Eland, technical service manager for the Bicycle Association of Great Britain. “There are differences in fatigue behaviour between metals, but the differences between metals and composites are very much more significant. The key factor is that impacts have a far more significant effect on composite materials than they do on metals. But low-cycle impact loads were not really considered when the original tests were agreed.” This means that a composite component could very likely pass all of the fatigue testing specified in the current standard, but could still fail in use.

New tests proposed by WG8 – which includes tech experts from Shimano, SRAM, Trek, Accell Group, and Mavic – will include the effect of temperature on composite rims, which have to withstand burst pressure from the tyres when heated through braking (or being left in a car in the sunshine). There will also be composite-specific tests for steerer tubes and composite saddle rails. WG8 will make its recommendations in a Technical Report due out soon, and this will eventually become part of the ISO standard for bicycles.



Source:

Bike AU, Autumn 2016
E-book "Faking It" by bikebiz.com
http://www.velonews.com
https://www.nytimes.com
http://www.bicycling.com


Ride On!



Monday 20 February 2017

Counterfait Parts, Where Copyright Means Copy-Is-Right Part 2

Why buy fakes product?

Love has a theory for what drives customers to buy fakes. He draws a line graph with price rising on the Y-axis and likelihood of a counterfeit increasing on the X-axis. He calls it the LOP Theorem; the letters stand for “legal,” “opportunistic,” and “piracy”. He points to the upper-left corner: “Here is a Venge frameset for $3600 that’s clearly legit.” Then to the lower right: “At $50, it’s obviously a fake and you have a piracy-inclined buyer. But there’s a gray area where people are opportunistic,” he continues, drawing a large circle in the middle. “They may wonder, ‘Is this a scam, or am I just getting a good deal?’

Love’s theory make sense to Dr Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University who’s studied the psychology of counterfeit buyers. We convince ourselves that it’s okay to buy a fake, he says. “There is a rationalisation where you say, ‘These companies make too much money, and this frame is made of the same material as the real ones,’” he says. These rationalisations are generally rooted in buyers’ perceptions – beliefs that are only sometimes true. For instance, many consumers believe that because almost all modern cycling gear is made in Asia, it all comes out of the same factories.



“About 15 years ago, a lot of the European and American brands began to outsource their production,” says John Neugent, a former bike industry executive who helped brands do exactly that. But there’s a broad spectrum of factories in Asia making cycling gear, from those that make products exactly to the specification of the brand, to so-called “open mould” suppliers, to full-on counterfeiters. The world’s top bike brands have their frames made in Asia not just because labour costs are low but because the facilities and the framebuilding technologies built up over 30+ years are world-beating.

The circumstances here are nuanced. By outsourcing to Asia, Neugent explains, the bike industry bears some responsibility for the problem. “In Asia, even if you have intellectual property agreements with the factory, when you show people how to build your products, you teach them trade secrets,” he says, adding that trade secrets are not subject to patent. “If the factory manager leaves and starts his own company, he has that knowledge. It’s just the way the business works.”

Another consumer perception: skyrocketing retail prices mean companies are getting rich even as they take advantage of cheap manufacturing in Asia. That’s only partly true. In fact, the cost of manufacturing in China has risen over the past decade to the point that $1 of manufacturing power in the US equals 96 cents in China. As well, direct comparisons of products show that retail prices have in some cases remained static or even declined over the past decade. 

What is true: at the high end, prices have exploded. Cannondale’s SuperSix EVO Hi-Mod Team, Trek’s new aero Madone series, Specialized’s new Venge ViAS – all can make a significant dent in an annual wage. It’s no surprise, then, that consumers may suspect they’re paying inflated prices when they’re inundated with listings on marketplaces that promise the same products, but at wholesale prices that cut out the middleman. “Customers are bombarded by $400 wheels,” says John Balmer, aftermarket category manager at SRAM. “Their trust is shaken. They wonder, ‘How can Zipp wheels really cost almost $3000? These seem like the same thing."


The Fake Ones



The fake frames may be the same shape as high-end frames but underneath they probably haven’t benefitted from the same complexity of design and lay-up. The top layer of carbon – which is for show and doesn’t hold the frame together – is no indication of what’s below. The best carbon frames – with “best” being subjective; best at climbing or all-day comfort? – will be made of up to 13 layers of carbon fibre of various stiffness moduli.

High-end frames are computer designed with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) programs to make sure the strips of carbon fibre are in the right place in the 3D jigsaw, determined by the fibre orientation relative to the frame section and to the stacks and plies of the layup in that part of the frame. To achieve a certain ride characteristic the aim will be for the high-end frame to be rigid in some zones, compliant in others. This is achieved with the precision layup of the strips of carbon fibre, with an optimum layering technique leading to consistent laminates. “Lay a sheet a few millimetres in the wrong direction or in the incorrect order and the characteristics and integrity of the frame may be compromised,” says Phil Latz, editor of Australia’s Bicycling Trade.



The layers of carbon plies are thin and precise in expensive frames; thicker and less precise in cheaper frames, and possibly slapdash in the fake frames. The factories producing the fakes may use questionable materials, including cheaper (and lighter, weaker and less stiff) fibreglass as well as carbon fibre (although the carbon repair workshops say they have yet to find any evidence of this).

The counterfait factories may not be so fussed about checking for voids, porosity or other internal flaws, and they may not pull out samples, cut them in half and check laminate thicknesses. Fake frames may be made with a greater concentration of woven carbon cloth rather than unidirectional fibres. The faked end product often looks just the same as the real thing, the only person who ever knows the fake is spongy to ride is the end-user, thousands of miles from the factory and who has nobody local to call should the frame flop. The counterfait factories’ quality-control manager is the end-user. 


To be continued...



Source:

Bike AU, Autumn 2016
E-book "Faking It" by bikebiz.com
http://www.velonews.com
https://www.nytimes.com
http://www.bicycling.com


Ride On!



Sunday 19 February 2017

Counterfait Parts, Where Copyright Means Copy-Is-Right Part 1



A fake purse is one thing; it breaks, you get a new one. But the disturbing reality that sets counterfeit bikes, parts and accessories apart is that, when you need them most, they may fail you catastrophically. And if they do, there is no one credible standing behind them.

Counterfeits of prestigious bike brands have a long history. But in the era of steel or aluminum frames, the deception was usually obvious even to an unskilled eye. The frames were usually substantially heavier than those they were imitating, the workmanship immediately obvious as inferior.

Counterfeiters generally are made up of two broad groups: factories that make illicit goods and vendors who sell them. Multiple industry sources told us that sometimes they are one and the same, but more often they’re separate entities. The factories churn out the fakes, and the sellers buy them to resell. The practice is mostly beyond the reach of Western law enforcement, with almost 90 per cent of seized goods coming from China and Hong Kong.


The Way They Sell



Complicating the issue is how counterfeit goods are sold, with the internet giving crooks an opportunity to proliferate that didn’t exist when counterfeit goods had to be sold in person. Some of the bolder counterfeiters sell direct on their own sites, like Greatkeen Bike and OEMCarbon. And fakes are still sold regularly on Amazon and eBay. But Love estimates that 95 per cent of the counterfeits he sees are on Asian marketplace sites like DHgate, or Ali Express and Taobao, which promise Western consumers direct access to Asian manufacturers, without the middleman.

“Alibaba alone is an umbrella with six or seven different platforms,” says Michele Provera, vice president of brand protection for Convey SRL, an Italian internet brand protection firm. “It has extremely evolved e-commerce and hundreds of millions of users a month.” Since Convey started working with Pinarello in 2013, the firm has taken down 45,000 listings for counterfeit goods (a listing can include multiple items). Wei Tang, who works on Andrew Love’s team as Specialized’s dedicated liaison to Alibaba Group sites, says that in the first seven months of 2015, he got more than $5 million in fake inventory delisted just from Alibaba websites. Specialized knocks down about $15 million a year total in counterfeit sales, across more than 80 platforms.

Candice Huang, a spokesperson for the Alibaba Group, said that it has more than 2000 staff devoted to fighting counterfeit on its sites, a problem that founder Jack Ma has called “a cancer”. And the cancer is proliferating, thanks to new dedicated shopping apps that are beyond the reach of most anti-counterfeit tools. Andrew Love (Specialized brand security and investigations.) predicts that the next frontier will be peer-to-peer sales on social media – Facebook, he says, recently rolled out a mobile payments processor. With sales hidden inside a dedicated app, and financial transactions routed out of plain sight, the entire counterfeit network could drop from view, but be as close as a couple of swipes on a smartphone screen.



The online malls do their best to police their listings but with so many moles it’s tough to whack them all. In a 2014 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the Alibaba Group wrote: “Although we have adopted measures to verify the authenticity of products sold on our marketplaces and minimize potential infringement of third-party intellectual property rights through our intellectual property infringement complaint and take-down procedures, these measures may not always be successful.”

Alibaba removes 120 million suspect listings each year. The group’s online malls have seven million merchants offering 800 million items – ranging from cosmetics to swimwear, and from electronics to sunglasses. Of the 60,000 Dahon folding bikes for sale on Alibaba’s sites, half are fakes or infringe Dahon’s design rights. Taiwan-based Dahon spends more than $200,000 a year to combat counterfeiters.

In the fight against fakes, Love and outfits like Convey use a variety of tools. They work with law enforcement to seize shipments, they pursue financial trails and get counterfeit sellers’ PayPal and creditcard accounts shut down and funds seized, and they have high-level direct contacts with the marketplace sites themselves. But the benchmark tool is a form known as a takedown notice. Almost every major online marketplace has a version of it. The idea is simple: a brand can register its trademarks and other intellectual property rights with the site, then use the form to submit a takedown request. Since the intellectual property rights are already on file, the sites rely on an affirmation by the rights holder that it believes, in good faith, that the advertised item is a counterfeit.

Naturally, counterfeiters find ways to outsmart the system. Tools like these rely heavily on automated web-crawling software that uses a keyword search to flag listings as questionable. Algorithms can easily spot the fraudulent use of brand names, so merchants get around this by not listing them. Instead, they will place photos of, say, Pinarello frames next to listings that, to an algorithm, look as though they’re connected with plain carbon bikes. It’s up to brand owners – and trackers such as NetNames, MarkMonitor and Convey – to spot the use of photos. Some of the photo tracking can be done with image recognition software, but the fakers can obscure them enough to throw sniffers off the scent. Many of the photos have to be spotted, and flagged, manually. The fakers can post new listings, from newly named merchants, just as quickly as the offending ones can be taken down.



To be continued...


Source:
Bike AU, Autumn 2016
E-book "Faking It" by bikebiz.com
http://www.velonews.com
https://www.nytimes.com
http://www.bicycling.com


Ride On!