SoreFeet

Now I'm more than ever wanting to support this little company. They are offering an all steel fork for 200$ or 115$ if you turn in your old carbon fork.

They claim that it gets destroyed...Can we trust em? Please read the entire link. I'd love to hear an actually comment from the company.

https://www.rivbike.com/products/show...ms-fork/50-718

cudak888 

Oh, boy. This ought to be fun.

-Kurt

bigbossman 

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........

Torchy McFlux

I love steel and titanium, but that rant against carbon forks is ridiculous to the point of being unethical.
He implies that they'll all just spontaneously fail without warning or reason. That's just wrong. He's sacrificing truth for the sake of a sale.
He should hype his stuff by talking it up, not hysterically putting others down.

robatsu

I saw that the other day. I was a Riv fan/Reader subscriber almost from the time they started up, although my subscription lapsed many years ago. I throw that out to put the following in some context.

A core business prop for them always has been to remain outside and critical of the mainstream. But now, to a certain extent, Petersen is being overtaken by the steel lugged sensible bike movement, heck, you now can buy fairly normal bikes at many LBS that 5-10 years ago only carried extreme race/MTB/<insert your niche>. Back then, the LBS guys would look at me like I was a dinosaur, now they call all their friends over for a little appreciative gawking. But Riv's institutional reflexes and momentum seemingly dictates there needs to be another dragon to slay.

Me, I have no need for carbon forks, but if other folks want to ride them, that's fine. And if they really are such a clear and present danger, like the Viscount death forks, I really think the U.S. product liability system would have shut down the carbon fork vendors a long time ago. Here inside the Beltway, I have no doubt that a very high percentage of the club riders on 5k+ carbon bikes (and there are plenty, check Beach Drive/Rock Creek on a weekend) are lawyers. There would be heck to pay if these guys were forever getting maimed/killed by their forks snapping off without warning.

That being said, I still like Rivendell, occasionally still buy small stuff from them and think that the cycling world would be a worse place without them. They've done a lot more good than harm in pushing for things like new production medium/long reach brakes, etc.

BlankCrows

So, do they buy carbon credits with the $85 difference?

zonatandem

Have broken a steel (Reynolds 531) fork on one of our tandems after 15,000 miles.
Have not yet broken our c/f fork on our carbon fiber tandem after 25,000+ miles nor my c/f fork on my c/f racing single after 10,000+ miles.
Any bike frame/fork material can fail!

Fred Smedley

Carbon bars scare me much more than forks.

nine14six

I always considered GP to be a bit of a nut, and this confirms it.

cudak888 

This is his manner of capitalizing on the new, anti-carbon-fork brigade. Someone needs to go on a witchcraft hunt to see what does happen to the trade-in forks. I have a suspicion.



So, let's see - so far, we have Rivendell and Della Santa prophesying about carbon fork doom and gloom; who else is going to fan the B.S. fumes?

-Kurt

conspiratemus1

I like that line!

thenomad

I need to put an ad on ebay for people to buy my steel forks and send me their CF forks. I'll put them to good use!

Amani576

Evidently Grant doesn't quite realize that even steel forks had problems once upon a time.
Back in the early 1900's bicycle forks were surprisingly weak, and would bend/break under even regular conditions.
The only reason people like him are skeptical of carbon fibre is because nowadays we have the internet and things get hyped up and blown out of proportion so quickly a bullet looks slow.
I wouldn't call it fear mongering, I'd be more apt to call it gullibility. He seems to believe so much about it, when in reality one fork break might appear in thirty places online and he'll regard it as 30 DIFFERENT instances of fork breakage. And he's not the only one, I bet.
We all take risks when we ride bikes, no matter the material. Some people just need to lighten up.
-Gene-

unterhausen

I have seen this, and seen it commented on many times. I didn't realize that he's subsidizing the purchase for carbon fork owners. Reading comprehension problems strike again. I'd like to see these forks. My LBS just got in a fairly nice steel fork and sold it for $26. So figure it cost less than $10 to make.

A.Winthrop

.
... and then there's the option of buying an entire, all-
CrMo lugged steel frame/fork with Shimano 600EX or 105
components made in the mid-'80s in Japan for $200-$250 shipped
on eBay.
.
I've got a whole bunch of them and I didn't have to pay
shipping to send in a table fork, let alone a bike fork.
.

SingeDebile

yes GP is going overboard, but the core of what he is saying (if you can dig it out) is that one little miss-hap with a pothole can leave an invisible fracture that will grow over time.... every material will do this but steel has a much longer stress life (several fold) then carbon or aluminum.... and when it does bend beyond its intended amount it can often simply be bent back, where as carbon and aluminum are both done at that point (assuming they are still even in one piece)

If I was buying new and was conscious about where I was getting it, a carbon fork is fine... but you wont see me ridding 50mph down a hill on a 30 year old one.

robatsu

Yeah, that's the same phenomena that caused some people to think riding Campy C-Record high flange hubs on the street meant instant death.

Grand Bois

My only experience with carbon fiber is with high performance sport kite rods and they fail catastrophically without warning and sometimes for no apparent reason.

https://www.skyburner.com/skyshark/ss-products.html

unterhausen

To be fair, I started worrying about my 30 year old steel fork and so I retired it. I could probably inspect it and find any problems that might lead to catastrophic failure, but I generally don't like riding on things unless I have full confidence in them.

That being said, if I owned a carbon fork with as many crashes as my 30 year old steel fork, I would have retired it many years ago. I think that's wise because we really don't have good inspections for delamination and other hidden damage.

Saddle Up

He says it all in the very last sentence in the link sorefeet provided..."It is truly a labor of Fear and Prevention" He's selling fear.
https://saddleupbike.blogspot.com/2010/03/zen-spot.html. I can fit a 35c tire in my carbon fork just fine.

velo-orange

Was that riv posting done on April 1?

Mos6502

robatsu

I'm pretty sure I saw it longer ago than that.

mudboy

Well, as a Riv rider, I understand the "cult of Grant", but I disagree with it on any number of points, especially when it comes to bike sizing...WAY too big, IMO, which is why I'm building a frame with essentially identical dimensions, but over an inch more standover height. My nuts will thank me.

Pete

robatsu

From the riv posting about the fork swap (in fact, it is the first sentence):

"When carbon forks fail, they do so suddenly, and you crash. It happens more frequently than anybody would like, especially riders and carbon fork makers."

I'm sure Mr. Petersen is very earnest about this crusade, but this lead-in in is disinformation at its worst (even if they mean it in earnest, and I give them the BOD).

Look, nobody wants carbon forks to fail (w/possible exception of Rivendell), so any amount of failures, even one, is more frequent than riders/cf fork makers would like.

I just can't believe that if this problem were endemic, that we wouldn't be hearing about big product liability judgments. And you can bet that if these judgments were out there, Mr. Petersen would be citing them in his article rather than citing anonymous cases happening "more than anyone would like".

Lets see some of the widows and orphans and some numbers about why this land is teeming w/them now - not just a few anecdotal cases, since those exist for virtually any bike frame construction.

This isn't something like asbestos or smoking, where the injury shows up decades later. You know you are hurting right when the fork breaks.

As for the Riv cult, I don't own one - I would perhaps if vintage frames were so much extremely cheaper. As for the part I can't swallow, it is the "raise your drop bars". Despite my advancing age/gut, I still like the bars at least an inch or two lower than the saddle.