Sunday 3 April 2011

Bike and helmet damage

I'm back from the Evans workshop with an initial, rough diagnosis - letter to follow and the handlebars and frame still need full assessment.  The guy in the workshop wanted to have a chat about what happened before having a proper look.  Nice guy.

Basically the front fork and wheel are definitely no good now and the back wheel is iffy.  It's hard to show the wheel damage, so I haven't.  The frame -may- be OK.  It's a few mm out but without a more thorough assessment tomorrow the jury is still out.

Remember, these are carbon fibre reinforced forks, so rather than bend, they will crack or snap and even if you can't see any surface damage, once impacted hard they can be damaged internally and you'll never see that.



See the crack right through, opened up at the back and bulging at the front.


It might not look like much damage but, trust me, that's trashed and utterly unsafe.

Helmets should -always- be replaced after an accident, regardless of whether there is visible damage.  In my case, there -is- visible damage and I now have a new helmet.  The absolute kicker is that this one was brand new!  I only bought it at the weekend and wore it out for the first time on the day of the accident!


Nice crack right through the polystyrene.  It's probably compressed quite a bit internally too.


You can clearly see that I hit my head on the back at the right.


Prognosis at the moment is that the bike -might- be OK to replace parts on and still be safe to ride, but I have to wait to find out for sure tomorrow.  But at the cost of forks, wheels and potentially handlebars all plus labour... it's going to be a toss-up probably even if the frame is safe.  There are comparable road bikes out there for the price I paid for this Felt and comparable to the cost of fixing it up again.  I -do- love my Felt, but...

I'm probably not going to post images of my injuries, mostly because I couldn't get a decent angle on them by myself.  Suffice to say, I have 13 bruises of varying size (6 utter corkers and 7 smaller ones) and a few grazes as well as the injuries you can't see (neck, shoulder and lower sternum/ribs/diaphragm area).

I'm not scared though.  And I can't wait to get back on a bike again.  It wasn't my fault and there was nothing I could have done not to crash, but that doesn't mean I should be frightened, it just means I was really unlucky.

1 comment:

  1. if ever anybody doubts why they should wear a helmet when cycling then they should read this......

    x

    ReplyDelete