Trek Quality Control

Buddy of mine gets his brand new Trek Madone 5.2 last night. Being without a bike for 5 days due to a crash he was seriously pumped to ride. He gets in about 10 miles and starts complaining about his front brake locking up. We pull over and start looking at and discover the wheel is wobbly. Upon further inspection we find that the two dropouts are no longer bonded to the carbon fork legs! Were the ever? Upon releasing the brake the entire wheel with dropouts attached falls to the ground. Of course when he took it back to the LBS (a fairly big Trek dealer) their line was "we've never seen anything like this before". Querying a few other shops revealed this is more common than the Trek dealer admits. On the very bright side my pal avoided what could have been a serious disaster had the wheel come off on our planned route, a busy road where we hammer over 30mph.

Curious if anyone has come across this issue before.

 

[runs off to check forks]

 

I'm considering buying a Trek 5200 or Pilot 5.0 - both with full carbon. From the research I've done, the most frequent failure of carbon components/frames is exactly where your buddy's failed - at the bonding point between fork and fork dropouts. Excluding crash induced failure, etc. You can duplicate my reading with some Google searches.

That being said, this type of failure has to be exceedingly, even vanishingly rare or we'd have dead and injured cyclists lining our streets, considering even entry level (Trek 1000 or equivalent) road bikes come with carbon forks considering that fork failure is about the worse thing other than being hit by a motor vehicle or hitting a stationary object at speed, that can happen to us.

Anything can happen to anybody once without suggesting a trend, one can only hope that once isn't fatal.

Bill

 

FWIW - I bought a new/never built Trek Y-Foil CF frameset back in 2001. It has seen countless miles over the last five years, with never a problem. Smooth ride, lightning fast on the downhills, and no evidence of debonding. Buddy of mine has owned a 5200 since around 2000, no problem.

I haven't heard of any chronic QC problems with Trek CF frames. The paint could be done better... can understand how this experience might leave your faith shaken. From my experience, I wouldn't hesitate to hop on a new Trek CF bike.

 

I've had my Trek 5.2 Pilot and no troubles so far. God helps me if the fork ever gives way going down my steep hill at 40MPH.

 

My 1998 5500 has not had a problem after several trialathons and a fair amount of riding. I must say I have not been consistently inspecting the bike before riding, but I will from here on out.

RR