ABSTRACT
Bicycles have now become highly technical pieces of equipment and are made to exact standards and tolerances. This chapter sets out the terminologies that are currently used in bicycle manufacturing. It discusses some of the System International and Imperial System of measurement units. Accurate measuring— called metrology in engineering terminology— is used extensively in bicycle manufacturing. Older bicycles were made with much larger tolerances than current ones. The chapter briefly discusses the five pieces of equipment which are used in bicycle manufacture: co-ordinate measuring machine, granite block, lasers, scanners and wind tunnel. A gigantic block is a granite block on which a bicycle can be placed. This block of granite will have a mass greater than that of the bicycle and will be supported on many hydraulic columns, so that it can be kept perfectly level.
