Concept Bikes & Bike Innovation - for better or worse

The major difference though... is they're not a shitty LOOK pedal system. :)

shitty LOOK pedal

You need more granularity in your ratings. I'm on record on here several times telling people Shimano are better, but I'm still using LOOK 40 years after getting my first set because they're plenty good enough.

And what’s wrong with running a marker pen round the old cleat?

Some people go outside the lines.

I rode 600k on flat pedals on the weekend. My transition from racer to tourist is complete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNkbhO1oUwc

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/AluminumBikeProject.html

Klein was a jerk. There were aluminum frames long before his.

There were aluminum frames long before his.

As I understand it, the claim related to welding oversized tubes, rather than just using aluminium, which as you allude to goes back to the first half of the 20th century. The US patent office has a long and dishonourable history of granting patents where the claims clearly don't meet either the "no prior art" or "non-obvious" tests, so much so that a cynical person might conclude that they're getting kick backs from the lawyers involved in the inevitable subsequent litigation

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/027097665/publication/US4500103A?q=pn%3DUS4500103

It seems the first claim is all about weight, stiffness and diameter-to-wall-thickness ratios. Claim 7 specifies aluminium.

Pretty weird patent and as you say it doesn't seem like an actual invention. It's just a patent for a stiff, light frame made out of tubes

Blimey, I never realised what the black thing is. You must be one of those people who reads the instructions.

With my pedant's hat on, it's not a patent, it's a patent application. Turns out none of those claims were granted so couldn't have been used to block anyone else from doing what was claimed.