Another day, another bike done gone; it almost breaks my heart to see one go in the ground well before it’s time. It’s worse somehow when it’s a wrecked by someone else as you’re off to the side as a bystander. When I see a bunch of bikes hung off the tail of a truck it makes me cringe, even if you have the little blanket strapped on that only protects the truck! It may look California cool but there’s a hard and sharp chunk of metal right up against the down tube and as soon as the driver guns it over some stutter bumps the bikes will bounce up and down and start to ding the frame.
This is pretty much the sole province of DH and other big bike folks but don’t think you’re in the tall grass yet. The other folks who seem to blithely violate bicycles are the shuttle crews at charity road rides and adventure races. Both those types will snatch up your bike and then dogpile it into some sort of transport truck or van. Scratched paint and minor dings are the best you can hope to escape with. The worst is a crushed frame and wheels. I have seen some of the charity ride folks replace bikes but I never met anyone who was happy to see their bike wrecked. So, if you shuttle be aware!
You may be able to bend a banana a bit but go too far and you’ll be sorry. Same goes for bicycles. All frames flex but it you go to far it won’t spring back. It also means bad news when you roll it into the bike shop as bending is a classic sign of an overload like a crash or other mishap.
With the way bikes are now, light and thin bending is rare. Most of the time instead of bending you’ll get a compression failure and wind up with something that looks like a crushed tin can. Once in a while though the planets can lineup to make something special happen.
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Cupper, our long-time warranty maven, sounds off of the unfairness of four bar foolhardiness
Today’s suspension lie will be the term “Faux Bar.”
Faux Bar is a Bogus Science term that folks with no real understanding of the physics of a bicycle made up and had other like minded people latch onto
(from now on I’ll refer to Bogus Science by it’s short form, B.S.). Maybe they just had trouble counting to four, I don’t know.
You can perform a check at home of your bike, to find out if has four bars for your own piece of mind: Shock that’s one, rocker makes two, seatstay, getting closer with three, and last, the chainstay which comes up as four. There you go, you do have four bars there. Just like a pantograph which is also a four bar mechanical linkage that predates suspension bikes by a long time. Unless you’re an expert in B.S. and then you can call it something else.
In this installment, a DH frame travels the world in the name of kid
Memphis has always meant Smokey and the Bandit to me; for some reason the movie stuck it in my head. Besides BBQ and a music scene it also has a FedEx superhub, and when you get a message like, “inclement weather in Memphis” on the FedEx tracking site you know it can mean ripples around the world.
There’s a line from the song that says “We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there” and that was never truer for a young racer who’d crushed his bike and needed a new frame. Some things like DH bikes are only made once a year, and when they’re all sold they are all gone. To get a new one the factory needs to set their current work aside and run a special one off. To top it off, a clock is ticking down to a once in a year, maybe once in a
lifetime race that, without this new bike, young guy will be relegated to spectator status.
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Cupper, our longtime warranty maven, reports on one wild ride
Here’s an oldie but a goodie on the fly. As a bonus I’ve tagged on a picture of the world’s biggest Kona fan.
Replacing bikes that break is a lot like being a vet or a dentist. People have a lot of emotion and cash invested in their rides, and one tiny misstep can lead to horrible consequences.
Sometimes you have to put a cherished puppy to sleep, other times you can just buff that mark right out, and sometimes you need to embark on an odyssey of discovery to figure out just how in the world someone could have done something like this to a poor innocent bicycle.
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