Boy am I glan I'm out the bike trade (and esp the bike design side of things!)
The CEN testing is a great example of a simple premis (test different types of bikes differently depending on their intended end use) being taken and transformed into a cobbled monstrosity that serves no perpose except the committe-whores who made it up and whos pay packets depend on an unweildy document that looks good onthe shelf.
Sorry but the test procedures are a joke and bare no relation to real life use of the bike! Even a first year engineering student (who are all drunk most of the time…I know I was) could pick holes in it.
All it has done is provide another way of driving people to buy "off the shelf" frames from the TBG which all come with a CEN certificate rather than try and design something new which is great for the big players in the TBG… The traditional place for innovation was small companies turning out specialist components (think Marinovate V-brakes, the Action-Tec fork or the A-Headset desinged by Pace!) before they got accepted by the main stream (and ripped off…but thats another story!)
Rant over…
SSP