Back in November we rocked your world with a video of a CSPC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) test being performed repeatedly on a standard, off-the-shelf carbon fork from a company that Mr. Lopez formerly worked for (if you missed the original post, you can find it here).
A quick recap of the details:
- The CPSC only requires this fork to survive a single drop from 180mm.
- The specs for this test were written well before carbon fiber was used in bicycle manufacturing.
- The new CEN safety tests are even more stringent that the CPSC tests.
Drum Roll Please…
And There You Have it.
The question isn’t which is better, but which is more appropriate for your needs. You can draw your own conclusions about the safety of each material, as there is plenty of crap steel and crap carbon fiber available for mass consumption. The real question comes down to who do you support? The people making products they stand behind or those that offset the cost of failure by selling high margin, low quality products to the masses? The choice is yours.
Thanks for making that test! As you no doubt remember I was one of those who wondered what a steel fork would do under those conditions. BEND is the answer, obviously. But NOT seriously or catastrophically, meaning the bike could likely still be used and the fork possibly straightened. I did an unscientific, back-to-back ride test years ago with a composite vs steel fork, trying to ascertain if there really was anything to the marketing rhetoric about the carbon fork smoothing the ride vs steel. Same bike, same course separated by one day. The only change was the carbon fork supplied with the bike by the artisan maker vs a steel fork supplied (and I believe made by) the same man. I preferred the ride of the steel fork by a rather large margin which was a big surprise to me though perhaps if I was planning to run my bike head-on into a wall the carbon unit might be a better choice based on your test results. Thanks again!
I usually try to run into at least one wall per ride…. sometimes two on those early morning rides to get my blood going
I guess I would like to see what a carbon fork would hold up to. My thinking is that I would rather have a fork bend back than snap or break completely. To me it’s not so much whether a fork will bend or not…..it’s about safety and I have never seen a carbon fork bend…….I have only seen many of them snap completely causing the rider to crash…..and well…..fork failure causes the worst types of crashes.
The thing is, weight savings is much more important in wheels and rotating parts than it is in a fork or frame for that matter. Parts like Stems, bars, forks, and well…..the headtube area of a frame need to be strong and if they do fail, they should not fail catastrophically. Bending is fine in my book…..breaking completely isn’t….;-).
Well, we have a video of that too…
In sort of a related subject, there’s this quote “… there’s no damping in a carbon frame, there’s no dissipation of energy – it just snaps back” WHAT? The amazing, miracle material that bike makers have been telling us for all these years has the capability to somehow dampen road shocks…..doesn’t? Here’s a link to the source.http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/trek-domane-a-new-bike-for-the-cobbled-classics