Carbon shortage: Give peace a chance edition
Posted July 28th, 2006 in Industry
As I’ve noted before here and here there is a coming carbon drought. So, in what is sure to be just one in a spate of reports like it, we hear that boutique manufacturer M2 RACER has closed their doors and left us with this statement.
In the past few weeks, M2RACER’s supply of high modulus prepreg carbon fiber has been shut off due to the heavy worldwide military and aerospace use. Carbon fiber is used in nearly 50% of the M2RACER product lineup. In addition, the price of titanium and exotic aluminum alloys that we use has nearly tripled in the past 18 months. Due to the unavailability of carbon fiber and excessive material cost increases, M2RACER can no longer be able to provide our valued customers with lightweight, high performance, and well priced cycling components.
Like canaries in the mineshaft it’s the little guys that’ll feel the pinch first, with the bigs not likely to suffer too much for a couple of years yet. So get your exotica now, unless of course in the face of rising energy prices the airline industry implodes (or the Republican Party decides to give peace a chance) - in that event it’ll be $10 carbon composite framesets for everybody.
Aftermatter: For a moment there post Cold War and pre New World Order, we experienced something called a peace dividend with previously out of reach exotica like Titanium, Scandium and Carbon flowing into the sporting goods market and almost becoming affordable - freed up by the now idle military industrial factories from the collapsed Communist Bloc many of whom were soon put to work manufacturing bicycle parts - those were the days.
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