Stupidity Rears it's Ugly Head

Many of you know what I do for a living: Investigate part failures of race cars. It's an interesting profession to say the least. I sometimes scratch my head an say to myself, "What were they thinking?". Maybe I should heed some of that advice...

As you know, I love to mountain bike. It's the full body workout and the thrills that it gives helps to keep me young.

18 months or so ago, I gave a Santa Cruz Superlight frame to a friend of mine. Cathie was a great little rider and she was starting to participate in more and more mountain bike races. The thing that was holding her back was marginal equipment. I wasn't riding my Superlight (due to my Cathy presenting me with a Turner Flux), so I figured, "What the heck" and gave the Superlight frame to Cathie to race. And race she did.

I don't know all of the particulars, but one day her car was rear ended and unfortunately the meat in the sandwich was the Superlight that was hanging off her rear car rack. The car and bike were both toast, and she was fortunate enough that her insurance company purchase her a Specialized Epic (and a new car). She returned the frame to me, it was sent back to Santa Cruz and in no time, I had a crash replacement frame.

So what to do? I had plenty of parts and pieces laying around, so I set about the task of piecing it back together. Begging, borrowing and scraping, I was able to reassemble the new bike. A good friend of mine in the race industry was good enough to sell me a really clean Fox Float RL fork for the front end. The caveat was the fact that the the steerer tube was going to be really short. Carl is a talented fabricator and he sleeved the steerer tube, welded it together and I was on my way, much to the chagrin of Mark, my local wrench.

The maiden voyage was Friday evening at LNSP. The bike currently has a 5th Element rear shock, so I did a quick Google search and came up with the recommended pressures. With a shock pump in my pack, I set off to "dial 'er in". I made it 0.12 miles when I heard/felt a snap and some immediate loss of control. I quickly unclipped from the left side as the front wheel turned lazily full left and I was left standing over three pieces of what was once my new steed.

It seems that the torsional, tensile and compressive stresses were too great and the aforementioned weld had let go. I was fortunate to have escaped with a only scrape on my right shin. Laying in bed this morning, I thought of how bad it could have been, especially if it had let go on one of the high speed sections of the Monbo. What was I thinking?