Gearoidmuar wrote:PT1029 wrote:I repair bikes for a living.
Over 20+ years I have replaced countless broken rear axles on bikes with screw on freewheels - most for not over weight people who use their bikes for commuting only.
I have NEVER seen a broken cassette hub rear axle (or even bend).
Better design, and probably better metal too.
Cycling 40y. Absolutely agree. Never broke an axle on a cassette hub axles. Broke loads on freewheel hubs. Not only that, if you don't spot the broken axle your chainstay can break due to metal fatigue. I'd a few of these.
Interesting. 35 years commuting and pottering around London with shopping etc and I have never broken one.
I have broken two steel frames, though. One Trek hybrid which had a lifetime guarantee on the frame. "Ah, but have you got a receipt"" asked the man at Evans, hoping it would have gone astray over the previous 10 years or so. "As a matter of fact, I have ..." And I produced a scrap from the early Nineties.
The result was a free alloy 3x Trek hybrid seven speed that my daughter happily abuses to this day.
The other was an old Claude Butler mixte frame, rescued as abandoned in the office car park. (I used to get loads of abandoned bikes given to me by security and I would get them going and hand them over to the neighbours' children.)
Here's the break:
Here's the bike. Mixte frames are pretty flexy, but can look cool especially with drops and a step-through frame is great as a commuter / shopper. Best of all I could leave it anywhere in the confident expectation that it would not be nicked:
And then I broke the front fork of my Carlton Courette in Parliament Square. Or, more likely, noticed it was completely gone at that point. I happily rode the bike home another five miles.