SCHAUMBURG, Ill. (BRAIN) — CABDA’s Midwest show opened here Wednesday. Despite a wintery-mix event happening outside the Schaumburg Convention Center, dealers from across the Midwest and exhibitors from around the world showed up for a busy day.
Floor traffic appeared solid, with some exhibitors predicting that Wednesday will go down as the busiest of the two-day show because Thursday’s weather is expected to be worse. A few major exhibitors who haven’t been at CABDA in recent editions were here this year, including Park Tool and Chicago’s own SRAM.
Much of the discussion (at least for our editor) revolved around tariffs, CABDA’s upcoming West show in Las Vegas, and the usual industry gossip. CABDA is not traditionally a place to launch products so the new gizmos we found were of a trade nature: wheel-building machines, lift-assist workstands, spoke wrenches and the like. Here are a few highlights from Day 1: Trudi is from the folks who brought us Berd carbon spokes . It’s a $6,999 wheel building machine that is something of a hybrid between a robotic wheel truing machine like a Holland (which cost several hundred thousand dollars) and skilled human wheel builders (who are priceless). It can be used to greatly speed up the truing and tensioning of a new wheel or one in for truing. The machine first measures the wheel’s roundness, trueness, and dish. A human then measures the tension of each spoke using a modified Wheel Fanatyk tensionometer wired to send the tension measurement directly to the […]
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