First Major Fork Up
Only a few days after my last post celebrating our crossing of the Rockies without major equipment failure, we've experienced our first bit of serious equipment failure. No injuries to speak of, luckily!
Andrew's bike (a Giant OCR-1 aluminum frame with a carbon aerodynamic front fork... more of a race bike than a touring bike) had been outfitted with front and rear panniers to get his weight nice and distributed, but it turns out the carbon fork was no match for the weight of the front panniers, and the tabs with the rack mounting holes right near the bottom of the fork cracked after about 1100km. Unfortunately, carbon fibre (or, as the nerd in me insists on clarifying... carbon fibre-reinforced polymers) is structurally unsound once cracked, so it was unsafe to keep travelling on his broken fork.
Alas, we discovered the cracks in Cluny, Alberta, about 125km outside of Calgary. Much to our surprise, Cluny (population, 200 - and I suspect that's including pets) didn't have a bike shop with replacement forks. Well, they didn't have a bike shop at all. Luckily for us, we knew a few people in Calgary who were awesome enough to help us out of our jam. Specifically, Chris Wong took 2 1/2 hours out of his time to drive down and pick us up in Cluny, then drive us back to Calgary, then drive us to a bike shop to get a new fork. If I had a generous friend rating scale, I would give Chris five stars.
Unfortunately, we had to find a place to stay in Cluny for the night, since Chris (being one of those people I hear about from time to time with "real jobs") couldn't come get us until the next day. Yet another stroke of total-stranger generosity saw us get invited to throw our tent on the lawn of a local couple who owned the restaurant we had dinner in. Even more generously, they invited us inside for a beer after getting our tent set up! Of course, he invited us inside while holding a giant plastic bag filled with what looked like bloody body parts. That's where things got a bit strange.
As soon as we walked into the house, he dumped the contents of the bag on his living room floor (carpet). Turns out the contents of the bag was more or less exactly what it looked like: cow femurs. Two gigantic, bloody cow femurs. He bought him for his two dogs, who immediately reverted to a feral, wolf-like state and savagely tore into the bones. As a guy who experienced a fairly cushy, cow-slaughter-free upbringing, I wasn't quite sure what to think, but after 20 minutes of sitting across the living room from our hosts and their savage wolf-dogs, I eventually tuned out the sound of canine-gnawing-on-cow-leg and had a very pleasant conversation with our extremely gracious hosts.
To summarize: we spent 2 days waiting around for rides and repairs, and tomorrow we'll be re-biking our route from a few days ago (aiming for Bassano), so all told we took 3 days to get everything dealt with. Not a bad price to pay for some good stories and an extra rest day!
Bonus dorky civil engineering rant (proceed at your own risk): Giant used single-direction fibres oriented vertically around the pannier rack mounting hole, which is a pretty questionable strategy from a structural analysis point of view. Why in the world would you put single-direction fibres oriented in the same direction as the shear forces which you'd expect to develop from hanging a pannier from a screw bearing on the hole? It doesn't use any of the strength of the carbon fibres, meaning they might as well have made the mounting tab out of plastic!
Andrew's bike (a Giant OCR-1 aluminum frame with a carbon aerodynamic front fork... more of a race bike than a touring bike) had been outfitted with front and rear panniers to get his weight nice and distributed, but it turns out the carbon fork was no match for the weight of the front panniers, and the tabs with the rack mounting holes right near the bottom of the fork cracked after about 1100km. Unfortunately, carbon fibre (or, as the nerd in me insists on clarifying... carbon fibre-reinforced polymers) is structurally unsound once cracked, so it was unsafe to keep travelling on his broken fork.
Alas, we discovered the cracks in Cluny, Alberta, about 125km outside of Calgary. Much to our surprise, Cluny (population, 200 - and I suspect that's including pets) didn't have a bike shop with replacement forks. Well, they didn't have a bike shop at all. Luckily for us, we knew a few people in Calgary who were awesome enough to help us out of our jam. Specifically, Chris Wong took 2 1/2 hours out of his time to drive down and pick us up in Cluny, then drive us back to Calgary, then drive us to a bike shop to get a new fork. If I had a generous friend rating scale, I would give Chris five stars.
Unfortunately, we had to find a place to stay in Cluny for the night, since Chris (being one of those people I hear about from time to time with "real jobs") couldn't come get us until the next day. Yet another stroke of total-stranger generosity saw us get invited to throw our tent on the lawn of a local couple who owned the restaurant we had dinner in. Even more generously, they invited us inside for a beer after getting our tent set up! Of course, he invited us inside while holding a giant plastic bag filled with what looked like bloody body parts. That's where things got a bit strange.
As soon as we walked into the house, he dumped the contents of the bag on his living room floor (carpet). Turns out the contents of the bag was more or less exactly what it looked like: cow femurs. Two gigantic, bloody cow femurs. He bought him for his two dogs, who immediately reverted to a feral, wolf-like state and savagely tore into the bones. As a guy who experienced a fairly cushy, cow-slaughter-free upbringing, I wasn't quite sure what to think, but after 20 minutes of sitting across the living room from our hosts and their savage wolf-dogs, I eventually tuned out the sound of canine-gnawing-on-cow-leg and had a very pleasant conversation with our extremely gracious hosts.
To summarize: we spent 2 days waiting around for rides and repairs, and tomorrow we'll be re-biking our route from a few days ago (aiming for Bassano), so all told we took 3 days to get everything dealt with. Not a bad price to pay for some good stories and an extra rest day!
Bonus dorky civil engineering rant (proceed at your own risk): Giant used single-direction fibres oriented vertically around the pannier rack mounting hole, which is a pretty questionable strategy from a structural analysis point of view. Why in the world would you put single-direction fibres oriented in the same direction as the shear forces which you'd expect to develop from hanging a pannier from a screw bearing on the hole? It doesn't use any of the strength of the carbon fibres, meaning they might as well have made the mounting tab out of plastic!
posted by Bryce at
10:59 PM
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