Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Real Taco'ed Rim

Ok, yo'all know already about the whole discussion going on all over the web about that one H+Son rim that split. I personally only want to point out that maybe you should not judge a new product entirely based on one individual defective item and incident. 

Or am I wrong in this? I guess time will tell. If more of these start popping up, then we need to re-evaluate this case but until then here's the most on the point comment I've come across yet: 

"It does look thin but that doesn't mean it's not a good rim. That was not from skidding. You hipster's getting all hard core pulling the circus/bmx tricks under some over-pass on gear designed to be used for other purposes should stop bitc*ing about it. It's pretty funny reading post's from hipsters with no mechanical or engineering background giving negative comments about gear they're misusing."


UPDATE!

Here's actually the manufacturer's response to John Prolly's blog post which he has not, yet at the time of writing this, approved to be published there:

"This is my response on the prolly blog. But I see he has yet to approve it.
I high doubt this rim snapped in half by itself causing the inner tube to be cut. I'm leaning towards the fact that it must be some outside force as you can see the sidewalls are clearly dented.

Anyways here is the response:

There has been no official H Plus Son reply as we have yet to see the rim in person.
The "official reply" that people are posting, is in fact a few weeks old, and is not a response to this rim.

Prolly the rim isn't half the weight of a Deep V, they are about the same: 580 grams.

The tire well of these rims is made to the same specs as the many other road rims we manufacture. They are 0.8, plus or minus 0.1 mm

We are a new brand. But the factory has been making rims for the past 10 years. We make about 6-7 million rims each year and about 2 million of them are double walled.

We don't want to piss anyone off, nor do we want to push responsibility onto someone else. But please we think there needs to be more investigation into the real problem of this before pushing the blame onto one party.

We have asked for the customer to send us their address and phone number and a representative will go and inspect the rim.

If for some reason the rim did not rip apart and cut open the inner tube, we believe we reserve the right to take this a step further in clearing our name"

You can see from this picture that the force of a exploding inner tube is huge. This is a posting someone else did on a different blog relating to this issue. These are mountain bike rims mind you.

"Wowza! I had some MTB Salsa Delgado rims fail the same way, although not as epically.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3002/3057218306_9fdaff008e_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3151/3057218132_f274dd180f_o.jpg

The outward pressure from the bead is apparently one of the strongest forces on a rim - who knew!"

(Please note! This following image is by no ways related to the actual incident discussed above that might or might not have occurred somewhere else at some completely different point in time.) 


3 comments:

asb said...

How about a scenario where the rim was damaged in an earlier trick and it gave up later when stress was applied while skidding? Google for metal fatigue aluminum: http://www.ihpva.org/com/PracticalInnovations/materials.html

"The major cause of failure with aluminum is fatigue caused by overflexing. Unlike CroMo, aluminum is not resilient and shall eventually fail if allowed to overflex."

alexander said...

my response...

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j236/alexandercase/hplusvag2.jpg

Prolly said...

Jesus. I was away from my computer for 30 minutes while the H+Son guy posted a comment and he insinuates that I was witholding it? Plenty of comments sit for sometimes hours in my queue. It's nothing personal.

Classy.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting this is because I wanted you to clarify what's going on with the Delgado rims? Where did those pics come from? I wanna see that.

Also, Delgados are a touring rim. About 23mm wide, you can run normal 700c tires on.

I'm lacing some up to Profiles now and I will be doing "circus/bmx tricks under some over-pass" frequently on.

That picture of tom doing the tire grab is on a Surly 1x1 fixed with a Rhino Lite front laced to a Profile hub. He runs 32c tires on 700c [29r] rims.

The Bike Forums comment is unmerited as well. The guy who broke his rim was not doing any bunnyhops or tire taps or other shit like that. Look at his set up! Traditional track geo with a HED3 wheel and track drops.

I asked him and he said he only was doing skids and backwards circles on it.

Anyway, I could care less, I just think marketing a rim to well-known fixed gear tricksters like Keo, Macaframa and Tom and then blaming a picture of a broken rim on "tricks" seems kind of catty.

thanks again for the links and the love. I just wanted to clarify that the only comments I ever INTENTIONALLY ignore are inappropriate ones that are either malicious, or from a site encouraging people to look at porn.

;-)