Vintage Carbon Fork?
 

Are we calling late 90s vintage yet?

I’m picking up a ‘98 Titanium Davidson tomorrow with what I assume is a 1in threadless Time equip pro fork. If the frame and carbon fork are immaculate would you ride it without worries or should I anticipate picking up a 1in threadless carbon Ritchey ?

I'm regularly riding 5 forks on bikes that old or older. I don't worry about them.

I would give it the usual "new to me" inspection for obvious cracks, corrosion, etc and ride it if it looks good. I regularly ride 90s carbon forks with no problems. Actually, one I bought had a crack near the fork shoulder but I hadn't noticed it until after I bought it. I actually put about 100 miles on it before I noticed, and I still have all my teeth. I took it out of service but hope to repair it and use it again.

That would be lunacy to trust a repair made to a carbon fork crown. None of the repair places would do such a repair and the crack itself shows that something is seriously wrong with that fork.

Carbon repair is mostly about fixing impact damage to frames, not structural failure from normal use or structural forces exceeding the design. There is too much going on in the crown to presume that a repair is going to be strong enough to both replace the damage AND make up for whatever flaw allowed it to crack in the first place.

Used forks are cheap. Please throw that one away.

Consider the steerer material. Many early carbon forks used an aluminum steerer.

I have this beautiful Look carbon fork, aluminum steerer. Elegant art and I knew the original owner. His steel fork was misaligned from new. I corrected that, exchanged the forks, later sold the frame set on.

You live in Seattle. Why not just take it to Davidson for a check?

Most old carbon forks had steel steerers. Aluminum only started being used for threadless - and most of those were still steel rather than alloy.