Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonrobot
The frame is the fork. Ride long enough and all the conventional wisdom is true. |
"A fork is the most critical part of the bike. If the fork is absorbing energy and absorbing energy correctly, it's going to give you a big part of the feeling from the ride that you're going to enjoy or value. So because steel has a unique flexing characteristic, it can be designed differently than carbon fiber and aluminum and other materials.
And as a frame builder, one of the most important things in the designing of a bike previous to anyone introducing carbon fiber was designing the fork in a way that when you did have an accident, the fork would bend and the frame would not. And so there's a whole science behind that and so you could straighten a steel fork. You couldn't straighten a steel frame. The frame required a lot more repair and difficulty in repairing it than a fork. A fork a replaceable or it was actually fixable. You could bend it. And the energy that it absorbed as a one-inch steering column was a unique thing. It would absorb more energy than a carbon fork.
A carbon fork, all the testing standards--what people don't know, the dirty little secrets about the carbon fork--is the testing standards have changed by a factor of two. They have to be twice as stiff in the CEN testing standards because if they're not, they break. A steel fork bends. And so you have to do all kinds of other things to the frame in order to keep the frame from breaking or from bending." - Tom Ritchey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-gGIqfVB2Y&t=1984