Pete Sampras, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Barry Bonds are great sportsmen who have one thing in common among themselves. They have excelled in their sport of choice and have achieved greatness. Almost all of the equipment they used at one time or another during their rise to fame and fortune have been made out of or contain aluminum tubes!



Sports and recreation are two areas where the use of aluminum tubes has made great inroads in the manufacturing process of equipment. Baseball bats, frames of bicycle racers, wheel assemblies of skateboards, golf club heads, tennis racquet frames, exhaust headers and manifolds of race cars are just a few of the sports equipment that have been greatly improved and made superior with the use of extruded aluminum tubes.

Both fans and players love to hear the solid sound of a ball being hit squarely by a player's baseball bat when a ballgame is in progress. Today's baseball bat is a so much different from the ones used by Babe Ruth, baseball bats then are made of wood whereas today's modern bats are made of extruded aluminum tubes albeit they still have wood inside. The combination of wood and aluminum made the players hit better and farther than before!

All cyclists in the world's ultimate bicycle race, the Tour de France, use racers constructed from aluminum tube alloys in order to lower the weights of their bicycles to combat drag and in order to be able to pedal faster with lesser effort on their part.

The transition of tennis players from using wooden tennis racquets to aluminum framed tennis racquets also contributed to tennis advance into being considered a power game as players gained more control over their strokes when they started using racquets made from extruded aluminum tubes in various widths and sizes.

The water sport community also took great advantage of the versatility of aluminum tubes. Windsurfers, Hobie Cat enthusiasts, deep sea fishermen and even weekend water babies all use gadgets, parts and gears for their particular sport manufactured from marine grade aluminum tubes and stock. One important quality of aluminum is that is can be given an anodize coat and painted over to match the color scheme of your rig. From windsurfing beams to oars and deep sea fishing gear, aluminum tubes are in wide use in the marine community.

Take a look at the bottom of your son's skateboard and chances are you will see that the wheel assemblies of high performance, competition type skateboards are made of aluminum tubes.

On the home front, even your outdoor chaise lounge and patio furniture, outdoor awning and umbrella and the ever present portable barbecue grill all have aluminum tubes as their main components.

Such is the versatility of aluminum that it is used regularly and extensively in more applications than we can imagine. Look at an elderly person's walking cane and you will surely see a variant of the aluminum tube, anodized and painted, a testimony to the metal's usefulness in almost all aspects of our daily living.