Advocacy & Safety - New Bike Safety Hazard

--- This just in:
San Francisco Chronicle
MARIN COUNTY
Bikes had defective design, expert says. Front-wheel lever blamed in series of bicycle accidents
Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Full story here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/10/BAG10G5SEA1.DTL&hw=jim+doyle+bicycle&sn=001&sc=1000

:( It makes me cringe just reading the descriptions of the accidents and injuries. I can so easily envision kids revving up to 15mph, happily jumping the bike a few inches on the curved edge of a driveway apron like I see them do all the time, and having the front wheel come out of the dropouts.

:(

The holes in the forks are there for using the washer they're talking about when an axle with nuts on each end is used. These washers are not used with quick releases. The "expert" is not saying the quick releases were defective, but that putting them on bikes that kids would ride was "defective".

Looks to me like he says the ones used ere defective as well as improper for kids.

"He criticized the manufacturer's choice of materials for the quick-release lever, testifying that a soft bushing was insufficient to hold the lever in a locked position. "

"It's like using marshmallows to try to hold it in place. There's nothing to clamp down on," Anderson said. "It's going to slip. It doesn't have the ability to clamp."

--- This just in:
San Francisco Chronicle
MARIN COUNTY
Bikes had defective design, expert says. Front-wheel lever blamed in series of bicycle accidents
Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Full story here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/10/BAG10G5SEA1.DTL&hw=jim+doyle+bicycle&sn=001&sc=1000

Nothing new here. There have been several threads on Wal-Mart bikes having bad QR's in this section

Every time my gf and I go to walmart, toys r u's, etc, we see these junk bikes. The QR bushing is like, a piece of teflon. I mean, the one on my commuter's solid steel... these things are cheap aluminium with a piece of nylon holding the wheel in place. I took a QR skewer out once and it was BENT.

Its fun to walk around and tighting up all the wires on the brakes though so you can even move the thing when you want to. Then cross chain all the gears so you can't even pedal if you managed to get the wheels to spin.

What ever happened to hard bronze bushings for QRs?
My old arias had them and worked great. Just soft enough to compress a little bit so you can tighten them up almost totaly with the nut then still push the lever down. Hard enough that it doesnt ware out very fast.

As for wall mart/kmart/etc bikes theres other glaring isues with them as well. Things like plastic hubs. Well its realy nylong re enforced plastic aka zytel. But its brittle from the start and gets realy bad after a couple years. My neices junk huffy had its hubs compleatly break up this year. She got on and went to pedal away and just from the torqe she managed to put on the pedals the hubs just crumbled. Now imagine them failing at speed. Thats just realy bad news.

I come from a bmx back ground and ive had hubs give out on me on every thing from flats to down hill speed runs and jumps. And that was just a hand full of spoke holes giving out. The end result was always the same me takeing a hard fall or getting tossed over the bars. Now i always sort of resembled some knight in plastic armor had all the gear helmet vest etc. Even had some odd looking wrist braces/pads that kept your wrists from flexing much at all. I still got hurt. Imagine some kid moving along at a 12 to 15 16 mph sprint on a bike and having the hubs fail in such a way that none of the spokes are even supporting their wait. A helmet will not prevent hospitalizing injuries or even death in these cases.

I think the major bicycle manufatures such as trek cannondale etc need to work to get these bikes pulled from the market or tested for safty. They are 2 wheeled death machines imo and should not be on the market with out alot of tsafty testing. Huffy murray kent etc all need to have the presure put on them by the big boys. If that means these companies (huffy kent etc) go out of buissness then so be it.

Guess I'm lucky then. My new commuter from Wal-Mart doesn't have QR at all. :) Nor does it have suspension. I like it!

Another story about how Wal-Mart executives teamed up with their communist Chinese partners to maim and disfigure American kids...and make a few bucks while doing so. And, this is news?

Greedy business executives, by themselves, have never been able to destroy the American middle-class. The communist Chinese have been laughable failures during their fifty years of attempting to destroy American society. But, in 2001, the "compassionate conservative" bosses of the Republican Party, the top executives of the largest American corporations, and the Chinese communists formed an alliance with the goal of closing the remaining factories in the USA, and exporting the last American manufacturing jobs. And, America is now being flooded with sub-standard Chino-crap products. And yes, lives are being damaged and destroyed.

We vote every even-year November for "leadership" in Washington D.C. And, we vote with our dollars every time we walk into a store. If Chino-crap is killing American kids...well, whose fault is it?

Good point, Alan. I would add only that Beijing has never been interested in destroying the US, even if they have assisted some anti-colonialist movements. There have been some Maoist movements outside the PRC but they have never had significant backing from Beijing to the degree of being a threat to the US. (Beijing is currently aiding the right-wing government of Bhutan, NOT the Maoist rebels who are attacking it.)

It's interesting how readily Americans turned on a dime ideologically when the party line in DC changed so as to allow cheap PRC goods - often made by slave or semi-slave labor - into the country. Evidently they had no real convictions in that regard all along, just obeyed what the corporate state told them.