Friday, April 13, 2012

Fork failure and recalls

Fork failure and recalls 

 Thanks to Jerry Merkey for flagging this post from Dave Moulton's blog. I rarely hear of recalls on bicycles and suspect I'm not the only one who has not paid enough attention to these occasional high tech failures.
I did a quick search on bike frame and fork recalls and got a lot of hits. 
Here is an interesting source of info.

Some recalls are astoundingly stupid, like this one of Cannondales because they lacked a spoke protector inside the cassette. How many of us still have our spoke protectors installed?

But a broken fork can be pretty catastrophic. Reading Mr. Moulton's blog and the associated links it appears the fork, a True Temper built Wolf SL fork that had been recalled, could fail in the steerer tube.

From Dave Moulton's blog:

"Gary Lanoue from Rehoboth, MA died on Monday when, it appears, his carbon front fork failed.
He was found in the road by a police officer on his way to work.

Gary was riding his Cervelo Soloist bike, one that was subject to a recall in August 2008 because the True Temper Wolf SL fork had been known to fail. I can only assume that Gary did not know of this defect, because who would ride a bike with a suspect front fork when a company is offering to replace it for free?"

A piece from Velonews about carbon fork failure.

2 comments:

Steve A said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Steve A said...

Cannondale sold illegal bikes. Those worthless plastic things are mandatory per CPSC, as are the equally worthless spoke reflectors and the deceptive front reflector that fails the legal test for minimal night operation pretty much everywhere. Fortunately, in most places, we can remove this USG mandated junk with no repercussions (though not in Lousiana).

Of course, we are both opposed to mindless government regulation - like the majority of rules about bikes. So, why can you only buy an inferior CPSC reflector at a bike store instead of the better SAE reflector?