Carbon bars from the East

I have bought bars directly from China and have had no problem with them.

My 2 rules; 1 do not buy anything with a logo on, it's just bad manners. And second, don't buy the cheapest. Look for sellers with good, solid reputation. Like everything else, when it comes to China you get what you pay for.

The only way is ethics.....

velonista, how about a link to these bars? That reach and drop is exactly what i am looking for. For balance, could you also let me know who/which the original bars are please?

This time last year, I bought my compact carbon handlebars from a Chinese wholesale supplier. They are a reverse-engineered, red-striped model of an alliteratively-named brand of Turin origin. My Chinese-sourced 420 mm bar weighed in at 185 grams (the claimed weight for the "authorized" model is 198 grams). Before I installed them, I took them into a local bike store that is an authorized dealer to have them check the drop and reach measurements.

Holding them up end-to-end to an original unit, they are a mirror image. Neither the salesman nor I could see any difference between his and mine. He confirmed what I had already measured (and what the Chinese supplier advertised): 123 mm drop/77 mm reach.

They've survived my bike slamming to a dead stop with extraordinary G-force into an "urban crater"; immediately followed by a bone-shakingly-hard, DOMS-inducing fall right onto the outer-side of the forward-jutting curve of the bar's tops.

To sum it up, these things take a lickin' and keep on tickin'! You can rest assured that anybody who tells you anything to the contrary will fall into one or more of the following camps:

1. Never owned a pair of Chinese-sourced reverse-engineered bars, and are therefore only regurgitating all the other groundless horror stories out there...
2. Paid full retail price (a.k.a. "up to four times as much" or "marked-up 800%") and therefore begrudges others for spending less on products that - for all intents and purposes - are structurally, functionally and visually indistinguishable...
3. Somehow profits from selling you identical product at full retail price...
4. Embittered because selling "prestige" products at "commodity" product prices, somehow robs them of that sheen of exclusivity that prestige-oriented marketing bestows on consumers' perceptions of a product's intangible value...
5. Collecting brownie points to earn a Junior G-Man badge...

You would probably find that their are multiple brands around the world using these exact same products (Moulds) and claiming them as their own...

They'll be fine for how you ride, just maybe don't start using it as a tricks bike...

http://cyclingtips.com.au/2011/08/are-all-carbon-bikes-created-equal/
I know it's around bikes, but the same applies really.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA1A0SD20140211?irpc=932

I'm not sure of the significance of this - it's not as simplistic as just "Don't buy Chinese" 'cos they make so many widgets for so many things that perform perfectly fine, and many of them with trusted brands, but even so.....

Dunno, if a safety critical part from a big brand fails then at least there's legislation in place for redress.

Ya pays ya money etc etc

All that said, doesn't carbon tend to fail progressively rather than catastrophically?

Many people confuse the fact that because some carbon items and frames are sourced from the same place as named companies and even from the same mould on occasion that they must be the same as said named items. Not necessarily, it's the manufacturing process and safety standard that counts.

No safety standard? No thanks.

Keith Bontrager put it best: 'Cheap, light, strong. Pick two.'