and he is not a heavy guy.
Thanks for the vote of confidence Devries, but my therapist would disagree.... Seriously though, these things are all relative, but I am not light (95kg - 210Ibs for the Seppos). But I had four ammo cans bolted to the bike (the picture in the link only has two, I added two more), and every day I travelled around with myself, and most often with two kids on it. Importantly it has a X5 in the rear. An idea of the kind of weight stress I was carrying around (I think) can be indicated by the fact that I went through/broke over time maybe 20 spokes in the X5 (ie, on about four or five occassions I broke four or so spokes at a time). I have never otherwise had X5 spokes break (being 12 guage) - and have run two other X5s at double the current (this yuba was running on 12S@50amps, my other X5s on different bikes which have never broken spokes have run on 20S@50amps). So I guess what I am saying is that clearly there was some weight being carried, and the bike was operating as my sole form of transport all over town.
Maybe most indicative of the overrall weight of the bike, is the fact that I literally struggled to pick up the rear. I am not a weeny guy, I used to bench press 100kg when I was young and fit, and the weight of the world hadn't crushed my soul, I concede that I weigh the same as then but can only lift half that now perhaps (my pecs have become moobs, and years of alcohol abuse have feminised my physique), but that is beside the point, quite seriously, I thought about it when I put it in a trailer to get it home (after the crash, which occured just outside my office on the way home), that I could barely lift the rear up into the trailer.
When you add the weight of a hopeless fat bastard to that weight, and his two kids, then I can only guess what the weight might be getting up to (mainly because I can't count very well).
But seriously right off the bat, when I moved to disc brakes (they come standard as rim), I instantly was concerned by how under medium braking the forks would sort of twitch, and under heavy sudden breaking, you could really see them move. I showed it to my bike mechanic who is a really clever guy, and he instantly agreed with me, and said he felt I should replace the fork. He didn't think the fork was specifically defective, he just agreed with me that it was not up to the job. I thanked him for confirming my concerns, and assured him I would act on his advice.
The problem was I became obsessed with the pending Euro crisis (this was a few weeks ago), and preparing for the collapse of the EU and the Euro, and what I was confident would ultimately become a coup in Greece and potentially military conflict with Turkey, that I put the forks down my priority list. I also became obsessed in a mania kind of way with the ideas of George Soros, the reflexive nature of markets, how that relates to Popper's fallibity, the Logico Tractatus, the uncertainty principle, how that might relate to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, how that might relate to quantum entanglement, and the nature of consciousness. ES member Toolman2 can attest to the questionable mental state I had got myself into, he had to put up with 2 hours of me trying to explain it to him late one night, when I was a little tired and emotional.
Anyway, I am rambling, but I returned to earth intellectually when I realised that people who matter were understanding my financial predictions, but could not understand a word I was saying about how it related to quantum physics and I suspected a good old fashioned sectioning might not be too far away. Ironically it was after a day of trying to convince others of a particular financial forecast that I was making, which ended in me maniacally screaming about how I had become "perfectly adapted to identify risk", to which they all shook their heads and looked concerned at each other, and left the room. About two hours later I was calmly riding my Yuba home (on my own), probably doing about 15-20 kph, up a very mild hill, leaving traffic lights, when I was attempting to merge but a line of cars wouldn't let me move over so I had to brake to let them all pass so I could move over (effectively I was running out of lane), so I grabbed my brakes (not to stop instantly, just slow down), and I heard a crunching noise and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. Just to be clear, there were no cars in front of me, the forks just collapsed under that amount of braking.
In hindsight, when I had left home that morning, when I went over a slight gutter, I heard a pinging noise (which I stopped for, it was that loud, but I presumed it was a broken spoke, after confirming it wasn't that I thought nothing of it). In hindsight, I think that was the first cracking, and the breaking of it later on the way home was the failure that had already started.
But you can imagine the irony for me, that the thing I most feared (a Euro collapse triggered by Greece electing a bunch of insane socialists) was in fact not to occur, but the danger it entails remains perhaps bigger and more lethal, but the thing I was concerned about enough to talk to my mechanic about, but then do nothing about and not think of again, did occur, but proved to be not that bad.
I have no problems at all with Yuba, and probably won't even be asking for compensation on the fork. I think it is a great bike, I just wanted to make sure noone else on here got hurt from a fork failure, because I personally believe it will happen at some point to someone else (and I have written to them, and hope they act on it). They just need to put in a stronger fork, and emphasise the need for a rear brake to be used in conjunction (I only didn't do that because my 5304 is non-disc).
Anyway, none of it matters, as I am alive, and I will be selling the Yuba, so I can buy more physical gold, seeds, and shotgun shells.......
