AndrewCowley wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2024 3:05 pm
I have a decent gear cable eating appetite. Every 3-4000kms, which equates to every 3-4 months. Both front and rear will snap if I leave them much longer. I put it down to hilly rides.
The shifter cable eating appetite is the most explainable of my appetites. Plenty of people have said the same thing and I think it's down to the climbing - 4000m per week average. Weirdly the gravel bike which I abuse a lot less also gets exactly 3000km out of a shifter cable, so it must be the terrain rather than the abuse.
The others not so:
- 1500-2000km to a chain. Hoping to fix this with immersive waxing.
- 6000km to a cassette. Same.
- 1000km to a rear tyre. This is just ridiculous and I know of no-one else who does that - though I can get 1500km out of a GP5000TR.
But the frames have been the real carnage. In the last two years:
- Bowman Palace cracked through both chainstays. This seems to have genuinely been a manufacturing fault.
- Avanti Giro snapped through the downtube. probably aluminium fatigue, and 30,000km+ half of which was on an indoor trainer.
- Trek Checkpoint ALR5 warranty replacement due to cross threaded BB from factory. Hey, that one's just bad luck and clearly not my fault.
- Focus Izalco Max snapped through the seatstay. That one's probably on me but still a weird failure.
- Wahoo Kickr Core snapped a steel tube in half. Also on me, with the warranty claim statement 'this is not a common failure'.
Pretty sure all of this is a consequence of a mild but fixed scoliosis (so I can't straighten my back fully) and a fit based on a 20 year old bike which has left me riding slightly undersized framesets, often climbing in a standing position. With a lowish cadence and high power to weight ratio it presumably puts a lot of lateral force through the frame as well as picking it up from the ground a fair bit which kills things.
Either way three days in hospital and 12 weeks off the bike due to another snapped frame has you think about things so I'm hoping a proper bike fit and some focus on saddle height and sitting and spinning will fix it. I think if I bought a heftier frame I'd still do the same thing because I'd need more power to go uphill and throw it around a lot more.