Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Counterfeit carbon fiber products and catastrophic failure


Interesting article in the latest issue of Bicycling Magazine if you have not  read it. One guy broke his neck in two places when his counterfeit handlebars snapped on a fast descent. Hit the link below and scroll down to the Ken Avchen story for that discussion.


As Jerry Merkey said to me in an offline conversation, even "genuine" parts need to be assembled and used properly and instances of good stuff breaking are in the record. Malformed, improperly assembled, crashed, or poorly constructed stuff is not worth the risk of a brutal crash.

6 comments:

JerryM said...

Your link for the broken steerer tube article is incorrect.

Khal said...

Weird. Thanks.

JerryM said...

This the link I sent in me e-mail from work:

http://velonews.competitor.com/2015/09/news/broken-steerer-at-worlds-likely-due-to-prior-crash_386664

My point was you may or may not know if your bike is damaged by crash, dropping it, or something that happens to it while it is not in your presence... like when it's at the bike shop for repairs or even before you buy it.

Jon said...

This is the second time I've typed in a URL on their site from Bicycling, and the second time I've hit a 404. Do their print guys not talk to their web guys? (Of course, the web version of the article that you linked has the same dead link.)

Khal said...

I just hit both embedded URLs in the blog post and they worked from here.

Jon said...

It's not your fault Khal, it's the link http://www.bicycling.com/unrealhelmet in both the article and the dead tree that 404s.