BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news

Sadly, an Australian cyclist - well-known to Aussie pro roadies - died yesterday after sustaining a head injury whilst showering. In a bizarre twist, before the reporting of this tragedy, contributors to the trade-only bulletin board of this site had been discussing creating the Shower Helmet Initiative Trust, a spoof charity to challenge the single-issue myopia of BHIT, the Bicycle Helmet Initative Trust

Last year, China consumed 18.7 percent of the world's aluminium. This year and next, China's consumption of aluminium - and most other raw materials - is set to rise sharply. A report from Merrill Lynch on Chinese snaffling of the world's limited amount of alumina, has boosted the share price outlook of corporate giants such as Alcoa and Alcan and confirmed fears that aluminium prices will rise by 20 percent through until 2006 (and then plummet)

British MPs have been inundated with anti helmet compulsion letters from constituents. If you've written to your MP (remember, it's easy, follow our simple instructions to email or fax MPs from your desktop) please let us know any stated voting intention. Jim Cousins, Labour MP in the BikeBiz.com constituency, has replied to our letter: he's set to vote a big fat NO...

The tourer, tandem and Audax bike specialist - big into mail-order - is to launch a steel Thorn MTB to retail for £1999 and fitted with a Rohloff 14-speed hub gear, Fox Vanilla RL forks and Hope mini mono discs.

They may be experts in welding lightweight exotic steels and alloys into artforms, but many framebuilders refer to frametubes as 'gas pipes' and the craftsmanship that goes into each bike as 'plumbing'. Now there's a place on the web for this self-depracating humour: Frameforum.net launched over the Easter weekend and has already attracted professional and hobbyist framebuilders from the US, Canada, Australia, Italy and the UK.