livedarklions

Is "selective state syndrome" a thing?

MO="You're accountable to me"
MA="I'm not accountable"


PS--I'm not serious, it's just a funny juxtaposition, and I like using the word juxtaposition.

Juxtaposition--YAY!

CycleNutz

Any updates on whether this is going to trial?

Oneder

My guess is defective tube plus some previous damage.

WizardOfBoz

I agree. The failures appear way too clean, brittle failure, little deformation. Even if this was initiated by a pothole or hitting a curb, the frame should bend, not break in brittle fashion. Downtube could have acquired deformation before, during or after (as in the bike flying into the fence) the incident. There's no way that this was not the fault of poor manufacturing, temp control, etc. At least in part.

Upshot: Brittle failure in the heat affected zone should not happen on a properly welded bike. If I were the guy's attorney, I'd have the tubes tested for proper alloy using x-ray fluorescence, and I'd have the HAZ tested for hardness, and the other welds for susceptibility to brittle failure.

dabac

I find it unusual how clean the breaks are.
I have seen a fair amount of failed aluminium frames, and even among those I’d struggle to find such clean fracture lines.
And this was a steel frame, which - to me - make the appearence of the breaks even more intriguing.
Sure, I’ve seen cracks in steel too.
And in steel welds. But they often veer off.
Only times I’ve seen cracks track that true has been associated with fatigue failure.
And the age of the bicycle would make that unlikely.

CycleNutz

I'm curious about whether it is a good idea to buy a Space Horse. Has anyone had any problems with ANY model of All City bikes in a way that was a catastrophic failure like the video described? I know any man made object can have problems. We're all human. But, I just want to know if this is a pervasive issue with this manufacturer.

unterhausen

Well, bad information keeps piling up in here. This is a fatigue failure in the exact location where you would expect to see a fatigue failure in a weld. Nothing remarkable about it at all. Sometimes fatigue cracks will propagate out onto a tube, but not always. We don't have good enough information to see where or why it started. Certainly there was a failure in rupture at the end when the crack got big enough that the remaining material couldn't withstand the load.

mr_bill

Excerpts of recent events:

On Friday, May 21 Case assigned.
On Wednesday, July 8, defendant filed a motion for partial summary judgement.
On Wednesday, July 21, dismissal of partial summary judgement.
On Monday, August 10 the plaintiff filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss.
On Wednesday, August 12 first pretrial clearance hearing.
On Wednesday, August 19, final pretrial conference date was set to 12/17/2021.
On Thursday, August 20, final judgement.

This sequence of events usually signals a settlement, often confidential, between parties.

Note that Macho Man and Macho Man Flat Bar have been discontinued.

-mr. bill

unterhausen

Interesting that they appear to have settled. I'm a little surprised they didn't settle when they first heard about it. I certainly would not have wanted to be an expert witness for the company.

Virtually no steel frames are annealed or heat treated as an assembly. There is no need. Aluminum frames are sometimes heat treated depending on the alloy. Something else went wrong with this frame, probably a welding flaw that we can't see from the poor quality pictures available to us.

I still need to go clean my All City

sheddle

I believe the actual manufacturer is Maxway, who make steel frames for a large number of mass-production companies like ACB/Surly/Jamis, not to mention other companies like Ritchey.

Maxway's site doesn't mention ACB but does mention the other major QBP brands of Salsa and Surly, so it's a safe bet they make ACB frames too.


I'm guessing "612" is some kind of own-brand for a custom-ordered crmo profile, or a mix of existing cro-mo tubes. This isn't really unprecedented (see: Raleigh USA branding their general 4130 tubes as "555") It's certainly not some kind of tube brand that ACB makes and welds themselves.


Anyway, this is all to say that this bike was made by an extremely experienced and well-regarded vendor of mass-market steel frames, and any QC failure is likely a highly isolated event. Otherwise we'd be seeing steel frame failures from a dozen vendors all over the place.

CliffordK

I don't think one could expect a quick settlement.

Bike damage + Personal Injury.

The bike company would have wanted to give a crash discount on a new frame. If that didn't work, replace it, or offer replacement cost.

Personal injury could easily throw it into $100K to $1M. Certainly a large enough amount to necessitate getting the fame for inspection, and some back and forth between the lawyers.

mr_bill

That, and the fact that All City has pictures of the inside of a Maxway factory in a “blog” post on their website.

That, and the fact that All City has a ”blog” post on their website saying exactly that.

-mr. bill

Pop N Wood

Liberty Ships had similar issues

https://offbeatoregon.com/1606c.sche...-ship-396.html

livedarklions

As mentioned several times above, 612 is the Minneapolis/St. Paul area code. The badge is a Minneapolis bridge.

Love to know the settlement terms.

guy153

Only with aluminium frames. Nobody anneals steel frames because you would lose the benefit of the cold-working. The welds are not brittle on a steel frame because they are done with a mild steel filler.

livedarklions

Speaking of Welds on a bicycle, it's Tuesday!

unterhausen

Not really, it had square corners on all the openings. I just recently saw something the U.S. navy put out reminding people not to do this.

Pop N Wood

Quite a bit more complicated than that but yes, that was one contributor.

Read the history of the De Havilland Comet airliner some time. Shows it takes some time to get the technology right.

livedarklions

Fortunately, the windows on my bike are rounded.

greatscott

Not strange at all. I witnessed a guy coming at me on a bike path when suddenly his cf handlebar snapped and he veered to the right into a bunch of bushes. he got scratched up up a bit but otherwise ok, had he veered to the left he may have hit me. He told me he had no control, his hands suddenly just dropped, which is what I saw, and into the bushes he went. He claimed he didn't change anything on the bars that required proper torque, so either the bike shop screwed up the torquing or the bike manufacturer did. I never heard the outcome of this event.

rydabent

Pondering this further, I would suggest the person that set up the robot welder set in wrong numbers. It could have been a new person, it could have been just a mistake in the setting, or it could have been Mon after a party weekend.

However it looks like the mfg settled.

Juan Foote

This was my thought.

The lawyer claims there are eye witnesses to the crash and that he was just "riding along". Supposedly is on video.

Just thinking out loud and based on the crease alone in that I don't see a lot of scraping along the tube end. It would seem like he may have hit a curb or something elsewhere and was riding along here when it finally let go. One would think that if this is on video there would be a notable difference in the front wheel angle or wheelbase.

enine

Looking at the pictures and remembering back to when I was welding, thin and heat treated steel you have to be careful when you weld to not get the surrounding area too hot. Welding by hand you would tack weld say every inch then come back and weld one inch section on one side then move to the to another area and weld a section, moving around so as not to get one area too hot. Welding too much at once can weaken the metal around the weld and make it break right next to the weld like that. so its plausible from the pictures there could be a welding problem.

unterhausen

Not really that much more complicated. The solution was to not cause cracks, i.e. make rounded corners. They have a lot of problems with stress corrosion cracking, but that requires cracks. De Havilland didn't understand the fatigue cycles that an airplane undergoes. They also didn't understand fatigue that well. And they had large cracks from square windows that they didn't expect so they weren't looking for them. I'm sure they had other design details that were very poor from a fatigue resistance perspective because they really didn't know any better. They are one of the big reasons we know this stuff, nobody had done it before. It's still not hard to find engineers that don't fully understand how fatigue failures happen.

There are two things about fatigue failures that make them seem mysterious. The first is that fatigue cracking can occur at stresses below the yield strength of the material. The second is that in ductile materials, it's possible to have long cracks without noticing them. Then a large load comes along and causes instant failure (rupture). Can't really blame a cyclist for not noticing a long crack. I fixed a frame that had a crack all the way around the head lug on the head tube. There was about 1/8" of uncracked material. That was a very long crack. You could only see it on the inside of the head tube. Can't expect anyone to look in there on a regular basis.

I probably said this before, but the bucking of the downtube is consistent with happening during a rupture under load. In fact, I would say it's obvious that it happened when most of tube was not attached because of the deflection. The buckling that happens from a front impact is almost always further back, because the moment is higher there.

Pop N Wood

I spent several years operating a nuclear reactor. Not a square corner on the reactor vessel anywhere, yet we had strict procedures regulating what temperature the reactor had to be before we could subject it to full system pressure. The restrictions were updated with the power history because naturally the neutron flux affected the nil ductility temperature of the steel.

Lots of factors at play. Getting back to ships the USS Schenectady is an interesting example.

https://www.designnews.com/materials...ittle-fracture