SOME lightweight bicycle wheels have a design flaw that makes them shatter
dramatically. “I had a guy come in who’d had his wheel on the kitchen table and
it exploded in his face while he was inspecting it,” says John Morgan of Bristol
University, who has been studying aluminium wheel rims. “He got aluminium in his
eyes—he was lucky not to lose his sight.”
Morgan told a meeting of the British Institute of Physics this week that the
problem happens when wheel rims are reinforced by a single aluminium section
that runs round the inside of the wheel. As…
