Hey guys, I just wanted to let everyone know the obviously stupid thing that I did even though I knew it was stupid has ruined my bike. Maybe this will help others as a warning or something... ? I've been running some cheap plastic fenders SOMA somethingorothers that did not have those plastic easy break stay connecters that most common sense fenders have. I knew this was a hazard but had ridden many 1000s of kilometres on them and had just sort of forgotten about it. It gets worse; I attached my Nitto Big Front rack (34f)? to do an overnighter on a nice trail while i was on holiday squeezing the adventure inbetween some bad weather and storms. On the second day, 80kms from the next town as I crested the hill...through a lot of debris and broken branches... doing ~15kmh (not exceeding 20kmh) my bike suddenly came to a stop. Just a firm enough stop to lift the back end up a little bit and make me have to put my feet down suddenly. The fender stays had lodged themselves into the fork along with the thick piece of bark that had caused the accident. "No worries! these cheap fenders finally failed!" I thought, "my stupid fault. Oh well, lucky I was going slow!' As I disentangled the mess, removing the front wheel, "Oh no, the fork is bent" I realised. "It's okay, the wheel isn't hitting the downtube I can still ride out of here... why has the head badged popped out funny though?" Oh, the headtube is shaped like a banana... Welp. I could have been doing 40km/h down hill and i could have died as well as killing my bike. This is what I am trying to commisserate myself with. It barely helps. I live in Western Australia. There are no local frame builders I know of or would trust to try and repair this frame. Shipping the bike back to Rivendell is going to be an expensive excercise and in these COVID times I'm not sure they can do anything anyway. I really just don't know what I am going to do. The accident was so minor and I have bent forks before. The problem here and the reason it has been so catastrophic is because the Big Strong Nitto rack reinforced the fork removing tis failure mode of being able to bend, that force was translated into the headtube as the fork actually bent where the steerer is welded into the crown lug translating that force into the headtube. I can post pictures if anyone is interested. The frame is weirdly straight and I cannot find any distortion in the maintubes despite the obvious bend in the head tube. The headset cups are only out of alignment to the point that a sealed bearing headset can absorb the variance and seemingly work ok. The bend has to have gone somewhere though and I'm not sure that if I got a new fork that I could feel safe riding the frame as is... I really just needed to vent, Thanks for listening, (reading I guess) Brendon M.
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