 What exactly does this CEN which I've started to hear mean then?
I remember in climbing when the CE standards came out a small manufacturer called RP were effectively shut down because they couldn't afford to do the testing and essentially their products would fail despite being the only company to produce miniscule climbing protection.
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 Yeah but I still have a rack of them 00's , they were just there to guide the rope, if you fell more than a foot they would just break. CEN seems to be about standardization and "harmonising" of specifications across europe, not entirely a bad thing.
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Actually I've just checked and I only have 3 left,00 / 0 / 1, loking at them i's hrd to picture hanging a coat off them never mind me plus any momentum.
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 Bikes now must have (or will have, depending on who you listen to, but if it's not "must" now then it won't be long) passed a bunch of strength and fatigue tests before they go on sale. It's slightly controversial, in that it's debatable whether the tests are entirely representative of the real world - frames that have had tiny failure rates in use have had to be redesigned to pass, some bits of frames that were designed to (and did) pass the tests turned out to fail in real-world testing, some of the tests are a bit weird (the standards require more front-end strength in a "running straight into something" sense than a "landing a drop flat" sense, which is arguably arse-about-face) and so on. But on the whole it's probably a good thing, and more than one frame designer has said that having to deal with passing the tests has resulted in generally thinking harder and coming up with more clever things. I've got a proper article bubbling away somewhere, should probably finish that...
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That would be cool Mike.
So do you think it will pass itself on to the consumer like CE rulings did in climbing, and do you think say for instance a 'small' or exotic company like erm I don't know curtis will feel the pinch if they have to send frames off for destructive testing?
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It doesn't seem to be too onerous, and it may possibly (I need to check on this) not apply to companies making tiny numbers of frames, or one-offs. Certainly Cotic, which isn't a very big operation, has got all its new stuff certified, so it's clearly doable by the niche guys.
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 I was chatting to a guy on a Santa Cruz freeride monster that claimed it was the only one in France as he had imported it himself. He was a Santa Cruz dealer and said Santa Cruz intended to sell it in France but it failed the said forward impact test (if I type Santa Cruz enough then someone at Santa Cruz will get a Google notification and be along shortly to confrim or deny). The thing looked very strong and rode very nicely but wouldn't pass a test the hi-tensile fork on a supermarket bike will get through. if you fell more than a foot they would just break. I fell several metres onto a couple of HBs behind a flake and they held (not the smallest HB, the next one up). With a brand new and highly elastic Beal rope the impact force is below the breaking strain of an HB at fall factor one IIRC.
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It's the forward impact one that's weird. If I'm going to ride into a solid object head-on I'd actually quite like parts of the bike to give way and take a bit of the energy out of the impact before I arrive 
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What tyres should I be using for a head on impact
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The biggest ones you can find 
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 A really soft squidgy one...
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 schwalbe big apple 3.0
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