Life in the Bus Lane

If you believe everything you read on the internet, every time you ride a disk-equipped bike with normal quick-release skewers you are literally dicing with death. Apparently this combination is a death trap, and from the hysteria being generated, must be a bigger killer than cancer.

Or is it?

Rather than being naive and believing everything I read, I actually decided to test this theory out, something a lot of other people would do well to try.

I’ve ridden with a slightly loose skewer before, and it’s quite easy to spot something is wrong. As soon as you touch the front brake the wheel klunks across to the left. I decided to do some un-scientific tests

Test no 1: Marzocchi Z4 forks, Planet-X hub and skewer, 185mm Hope E4 brake.

Starting from a correctly tightened skewer, I had to fully open the lever and unscrew it 4 full turns before the wheel would pop out. The wheel was so loose at the time that even Helen Keller would have noticed something was amiss.

Test no 2: Fox Vanilla Forx, Hope XC hub, Syncros steel skewer, 185mm Hope E4 brake.

With the lever fully opened and unscrewed three full turns, the wheel remained within the dropouts.

I’m not saying that the current method of retaining the wheel within the fork is perfect, but from my experience, it’s not as dangerous as some people are making out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2003 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Bikes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.