"Tony Raven" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:<
[email protected]>...
>
> James' article skips quickly over the lawyers lips issue saying no more than they are not there
> for that purpose (true) while not analysing the effect of the fact they are there. It would be
> pretty difficult to get a done up QR past them even if the QR had no retaining force. I don't know
> for certain but would assume Fox forks have the usual lawyers lips which would rule this out as a
> cause in Russ's case unless he had filed them off. James' failed forks did not have them and they
> had a rear facing front dropout to compound the problem. We discussed this some time ago and I
> remain to be convinced that James' problem was as he describes and there is plenty of evidence we
> (including Russ) have raised before to support an alternative failure mechanism. Incidentally Russ
> had Pace forks, which don't have lawyers lips, for some time without those forks "failing". Its
> worth exploring but my personal opinion is that this is probably not relevant to the accident or
> most forks fitted with disc brakes.
yards ABOVE the rider, and he was a further 25 yards ABOVE the bike. Do you think Russ chucked the
bloody thing back up there after the crash? The 'catastrophic fork failure' is exactly what you
would expect from going ends first into the ground and speed, but it was not the cause of the crash.
Maybe the crash scene isn't incontrovertible proof, but surely even you can see it's a bloody great
smoking gun?
I'll be happy to eat my words if anyone can come up with a half-credible alternative scenario for
this crash, or the 3 other similar recent ones that I know of and consider to be directly caused by
front wheel loss. Remember that even in my case, when it happened in front of my eyes and the fork
ends had no retention lips and were pointing the wrong way, people were falling over themselves to
invent fanciful scenarios involving hitting a large obstacle (on a clear road in daylight), blowing
out the tyre and wedging the wheel. After all, we all know that quick releases simply don't fail....
Of course the lawyer lips have some effect, but they are highly variable in design, and may not mate
very well with different QR heads. There's no reason for them to do so, after all they are not
designed to withstand a pull, and the only standard governing their design is a rule of thumb about
their total height (enough that an unfastened QR will not drop out).
You claim above that 'there is plenty of evidence ... to support an alternative failure mechanism',
so now it's over to you to explain what this failure mechanism is, and what evidence you believe
there is in support of it.
James