This past Tuesday I was riding with my girlfriend on her morning commute. I wanted to give my new Mondonico a test ride before getting my teeth pulled. We got as far as the end of 2nd Street when I saw what looked like a crank arm drop from her bike! My first thought was that the crank arm screw had worked its way loose and it dropped the arm. However, when I picked up the piece the arm had broken right off!
I had never seen anything like this. My girlfriend doesn't do anything crazy with the bike (no ramps, freeriding or bunnyhops), except for commuting four days a week on it.
Fortunately, this happened in our neighborhood and not while we were on tour. We rolled it into one of our favorite coffee shops and asked them if we could store it their for the day. I planned to come back later with a set of 105 cranks and BB which I harvested from another bike and put them on.
She has only about 2500 miles on the bike and for something like this to happen really makes us think it's some sort of manufacturing error. Maybe a bad batch of aluminum?
2 comments:
It's quite possible that it is defective.. the bike shop should be able to warranty it. It would take a powerful microscope to be able to determine whether there was a grain structure problem. That's the inherent weakness w/ aluminum; when it fails, it fails catastrophically. She's lucky she didn't end up with a huge gouge in her leg: I saw that elsewhere (it may have been the Fatcyclist.com blog) when someone else's crank arm broke. Glad to hear that your GF is ok!
BTW, found the article about you in the environmentaldefense.org website b/c of a posting in the RootsRadicals Yahoo group! Keep up the great work, and if I ever have reason to need photography in the L.A area, I'll be calling YOU!
BTW, you have a great counterpart in Cascadia, Derek Pearson. His bike related site is http://bikerubbish.com/ and his professional site is http://derekpearson.com/.
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