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February 2024
Safety is paramount when riding a bicycle. Cane Creek Cycling Components designs and develops bicycle components with product safety in mind. To accomplish this, we test our products to standards set by various institutions as well as our own Cane Creek standards. Our internal standards often exceed the minimum compliance standard set by these institutions because we insist on engineering and developing premium products.
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 4210 is one of the most widely accepted minimum compliance standard for bicycles. Each bicycle component has its own set of tests that it must surpass for certification. EN 15194 is a European standard specifically for electric bicycles. EN 14766 is another European standard that specifies safety and performance requirements for the design, assembly, and testing of bicycles and sub-assemblies for off-road, rough-terrain use.
Presently, it is not USA federal law to test to ISO 4210. Since Cane Creek sells products globally, we ensure that our products are tested to ISO, EN, and internal standards to be compliant and guarantee confidence in our product offerings. In addition to performing ISO and EN tests, Cane Creek engineers develop and perform their own tests to determine stiffness, durability, and other performance behaviors. We attach data acquisition instruments to bicycles outfitted with products that are under development. This allows us to ride a trail or road of interest and capture the forces applied to the product that is being designed. With this data, we can replicate the cycling of forces in our R&D lab thousands of times. This accelerates our testing procedures by achieving thousands of “rides” in the time it would take us to ride a particular trail or road a handful of times.
Another institution that sets regulations on bicycle products is the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission). They laid out standards and test requirements for bicycles in the 1970’s, however these were initially written for steel bicycles without disc brakes. Since then, there are many types of bicycles and bicycle components on the market comprised of aluminum, carbon fiber, titanium, elastomers, batteries, motors, integrated shift/brake levers, etc. that the CPSC regulations do not address. ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) also has a set of regulations pertaining to bicycles. With multiple institutions around the world setting testing requirements and having different laws within each country that Cane Creeks sells products in, we choose to test to the strictest requirements. National and global regulations will adjust over time, so Cane Creek continues to design and engineer new products that meet and often surpass the testing requirements set by the toughest standards.
During product development at Cane Creek, the engineering team tests prototypes as well as final production parts and records results as dictated by the strictest known regulations. After this is accomplished, testing will continue until the product fails. This includes force loading a crank set until a crank arm breaks or dropping weight on a fork until its structure fails. It is valuable to record when this occurs and understand which area of a product failed first. As long as this failure happens after the minimum testing requirement set by international standards and Cane Creek’s internal standard, we can deem the product robust, strong, and safe for sale. We do this all for the safety of our customers and desire to deliver premium products built with craftsmanship.
