Has it really been a year since Raul Ruiz shocked the world by winning the NBL Cruiser Worlds on a $199 Redline RL444 tri-moly cruiser, for which I paid $100 as a used bike? Well, no. It's been about eleven months, but you have to admit that the above sentence is an interesting, if shopworn, way to begin a story. Well, for those of you who were not part of this elite reader community last year, here's what happened, in no particular order:
The Bolivian 'pro section', for those of you who have never seen it, is a terrifying lineup of four long, steep doubles which, in size and difficulty, somewhat exceed the typical American pro section. Furthermore, it has to be attacked at full speed - anything less and you are likely to find your trip through the section unsuccessful at best and quite injurious at worst, since the jumps have very little 'lip'.
As fate would have it, Raul was out riding this section one day and
managed to put his front wheel squarely into the face of one of the
doubles' second jumps. What happened next? Well...
When the fork broke, Raul put his face into the dirt and managed to
come up with forty stitches' worth of damage to his lower lip and
gums. Bummer, huh? And doesn't this incident show the fallacy in the
idea that you can race, and win, on a $199 bike? After all, most
people would rather not have their fork's steerer tube snap out from
under them, even if it means paying a little extra. Let's defer that
question for a moment while we examine the photo below, taken by Jack
McDaniel of www.idcbmx.com:
ouch. I don't know what happened to the poor rider in this case (particularly since he was still clipped in at the moment the photo was taken) but I will take a wild guess and suggest to you, dear reader, that whatever happened hurt quite a bit.
I have been told that the frame in the photo, which has apparently snapped at the head tube welds, is a Clayborn. Since the trademark Clayborn 'extra tube' is visible in the photo, it seems reasonable to assume that my information is correct. Note the disclaimer which Mr. McDaniel attached to the photo, which is presumably to keep the BMX Toadies and "industry people" from screaming at him for making the photo available on his website.
You see, frame breakages are something we don't talk about in the world of BMX racing, because when you talk about frames breaking, you hurt people's feelings, and very few people who are involved in BMX at the making-a-living level can afford to hurt anyone's feelings. Let me give you an example. Five years ago, I saw someone snap the head tube off their aluminum Mongoose at the Christmas Nationals. I was in the process of trying to snap a photo of said snapped 'Goose when I was accosted by self-styled "industry insider" Bill Grad, who told me that he would "drop me on my head" if I took the photo. Now, how Mr. Grad, who is about the size of Gary Coleman in the first season of "Diffrent Strokes", was going to drop a 6'2", 230-pound Boswell on his head was never made quite clear... but it was plain that Grad felt that part of his responsibility as an "industry insider" was to prevent photos of cracked frames from being distributed to the general public! Keep in mind, Grad wasn't involved with any frame companies at the time, but he, like many others, clearly felt that frame breakages should be "hushed up". Unfortunately for Billy G., I'm not "in the business" and therefore I am free to say what I want. (Imagine me sticking my tongue out and waving my hands around - because that's what I'm doing. Take that, industry toadies!)
It's funny that Mr. Grad was nowhere to be seen when I was helping that injured rider get his bags and equipment later together and some "industry involvement" could have been genuinely useful, but that's the way it goes when you deal with BMX Toadies... a matter for next month's column, perhaps. Anyway, back to this Clayborn. Did it break because it is a piece of junk? I doubt it. Did it break because every frame, subjected to enough time and impact, will break? Probably. Are aluminum frames more likely to break than Cr-Mo frames with the same service life, all other things being equal? All I can say, dear reader, even though people don't like to hear it, is Yes.
We have discussed this in past columns, but aluminum and Cr-Mo frames fail for different reasons. Every single hit on an aluminum frame creates microscopic cracks in the metal structure. That's not a matter of conjecture, it is a known fact. Don't get scared yet - the same thing is true of airplane wings, Land Rover bodies, and many other durable products. The microscopic cracks caused by impacts are usually not harmful. If the frame is ridden beyond its service life, however, it can snap without warning as the micro-cracks get together to form significant cracks.
And now we get to the real reason frames and forks fail: a number of strong impacts delivered over the course of the service life. To which most people will respond with "Duh", but it bears thinking about, particularly with regard to what constitutes a "service life". Cr-Mo frames, ridden reasonably gently, can have a nearly infinite service life. By "gently" I don't mean taking a "gentle" drop off a loading dock, or a "gentle" landing from a botched truck driver fifteen feet off the ground - I mean gentle race use without too many bad landings or big jumps. Under "gentle" use, Raul's RL444 would have lasted for the rest of his life, but he didn't use it gently - he boosted big jumps and hard landings, over and over again.
If you look at the area where Raul's fork broke, you will see that that in normal use that part of the steerer tube is hidden inside the head tube. The tube may have displayed signs of stress - it may have even been partly cracked - but there was no way to check, short of hauling the fork out for a look. Perhaps it's not a bad idea to check your fork out once in a while, even if it means disassembling the bike. It may have saved Raul a lot of trouble.
On the other hand, the fork may have been in perfect condition and the impact may simply have exceeded the available metal strength. We're talking about a two-hundred-pound man hitting a dirt wall at 25 miles per hour, after all. There's no way to tell.
The Clayborn, on the other hand, probably broke because it had been subjected to many minor impacts, which weakened the aluminum frame to the point where a major impact was sufficient to snap both the welds. Again, this does not mean that Clayborn was negligent in building this frame. Microcracking is a known property of aluminum frames. In fact, if you ride any aluminum frame long enough under race conditions it will crack - and it doesn't matter how many heat-treatings, special tubes, and two-page ads in TWBMX were involved in its construction. With the modern five-pound aluminum frames (gee, remember when aluminum frames were supposed to be light? Now that they are no longer lighter, we're supposed to buy them because they are stiffer. But I digress.) the time between first jump and last jump may be five years... but it is still a ticking time clock. Ignore that clock at your own peril.
If you are interested in racing an aluminum frame and want to stay safe, there's an easy way to do so. Simply determine the lifetime of your frame and get rid of it before you reach the end of that lifetime. The manufacturers obviously don't publish "life cycle" information but it's not hard to figure out a set of conservative guidelines. I, personally, wouldn't want to keep a modern aluminum frame for more than a year or so of National-level racing. If I were boosting big Pro sections, I'd probably take that figure down to six months. Sure, it's expensive to swap your frame twice a year. It's also expensive to go to the hospital. Your choice.
Riders with chromoly frames can measure their frame's life expectancy in terms of big hits and tube condition. When you hear that metal-on-metal 'clang' upon landing, you should mentally advance your 'trade-in' date a few months. Under reasonable racing circumstances, an adult-sized Expert should be able to get two or three years of racing out of a modern Cr-Mo frame... but if you see bulging tubes or feel looseness in the frame, swap it out right then and there. To coin a phrase, "better safe than sorry".
With these rules fresh in our minds, let's warp forward in time to Day 1 of the Indianapolis National this year, Pro Open class, moto 2. I am rounding the first turn in dead last... but what's this? Two of the A Pros ahead of me are being balked by the pack! Maybe I can catch them on the outside if I sneak a crank in before the double!!! I am so consumed by what auto racers call the "red mist" that I let my front wheel drop between the two humps of a routine fifteen-foot double. My front Skyway Tuff Wheel (a little product placement there) hits the front of the second hump at Boswell Max Warp...
CLANG!!! The metallic noise of the impact is audible from the spectator's area as my stomach is driven into the crossbar (admittedly, it didn't have far to go) and my head leans out and over past the front wheel. Somehow I recover and bump-jump off the top of the second hump, taking a moment to collect myself before taking off after the now distant pack. Did I crack something? It certainly sounded like I did, but a thorough inspection afterwards showed that I had not. Sure, it was a relatively small jump, but weight and inertia-wise, I relate to the average 14X the way a Ford Excursion does to a Ford Focus, so the possibility for all sorts of mayhem was definitely present. My post-mortem guess is that the impact temporarily separated the lower bearings, letting the lower bearing race come into direct contact with the headset cup.
The really annoying part is when I make pretty much the same mistake, with less disturbing results, in the third moto. Another quick check of the bike confirms that it is okay and ready for more of the same. Obviously, I can't keep making those kind of mistakes and expect the bike to last forever, but I have made some choices which I hope will keep me from ever taking a face-first trip to the hospital: