Tech

During quiet moments I often find myself hatching cycling challenges; they provide me with tangible reasons to get out on my bike and train, especially during the cold winter months. “Something to aim at”, as Tom Simpson would say. Some challenges, however, seem to appear out of left-field and, no matter how ridiculous, plug away at my subconscious until I do something about them.

At the end of September Jo Burt and I headed out to Milan to check out Italy's top bike show. In the first installment of our adventures we looked at what the likes of De Rosa Casati and Montante had to offer.  Now it's time for another trawl through the sublime and the ridiculous (which being Italian could easily pass for sublime too) as we look at the bikes being displayed by some less well known brands and from an ultra-bling one and we've included one of our Milan videos too - more of those in our video section. 

Most of us will have heard of Bianchi Colnago, De Rosa and Pinarello Italy's successful international bike brands, but there are other great Italian bike companies with a long history too, Casati, Guerciotti, Carraro, Bottecchia and Basso may be not so familiar but they've been around a long time too … and new ones like Guerra, Montante, and NoBrain that you won't really see outside of Italy. To find out what they are up to you need to go to Milan.

Well, that's the end of bicycle exhibitions for the year. The Cycle show in Earls court was a good show although I am still not that sure what its exact purpose is? It isn't quite a trade show for brands to show case new kit and it definitely isn't a place where you can purchase the latest bit of bike jewellery.

Not even ten minutes in the door and already I’m show-blind.

Deutschland Über Halles

A walk through Shimano, completely oblivious to the Eddy Merckx stand on my left that I would only discover three days later - as they were packing up, and blitzkrieg blinged by the triumvirate onslaught of the Bianchi, DeRosa and Campagnolo stands with a sneaky south-paw kidney-punch by Cervelo to the side and my brain rolls over and surrenders.

One of the more welcome distractions for bike journalists during the second rest day of the 2007 Tour De France was a press conference by none other than the Lion of Flanders himself, Johann Museeuw.

But the Leeuw wasn't here just to add his support for protégé Tom Boonen's bid for the points competition or speculate whether or not Rasmussen could hold the yellow jersey all the way to Paris.

Hub gears are big in the world of commuter bikes these days with everything from three to 14 speeds available. The benefits to the rider are straightforward: the chainline is simple and fixed, which means longer chain life and the ability to enclose the chain for even lower maintenance; and the gear mechanism itself is protected from the elements too, meaning there's less tinkering to be done there as well.

Trek's new Time trial bike – currently named the Speed Concept – has been much in the spotlight over the first week of the Tour de France, with three Astana riders (Armstrong, Contador and Leipheimer) piloting the machine in the Kazakh Team's TTT victory. But there's more to this bike than simply a refinement of the current TTX.

rafael was a late entry to the exhibitors list at the first European Handmade Bicycle Exhibition was a brand name very few attendees would have known or heard of rafael.

That is changing fast, not only due to the eye-catching designs appearing under its name but because rafael claims to have found a method of production that will revolutionise the building of carbon frames.

rafael gallery