Originally Posted by
lonesomesteve
I've owned three Treks with the dreaded Ishiwata CCL fork crown. I rode the first one for about 15,000 miles before it was stolen. The second one was ridden for about 5,000 miles and then sold in a misguided fit of Swedish death cleaning.
Hoarding behavior runs in my family, and I'm deciding to embrace it!! I'm calling it "radical activist ownership" because of course the Man would rather have us rent something from him rather than pull it from our personal junkpiles.
Down with big minimalism!
The third is the Frek pictured at the top of this thread. It now has about 16,000 miles on it and is going strong. A good portion of my riding is on bumpy pot-holed gravel roads in the Cascade mountains. None of these three bikes ever showed any sign of cracking, and I do check for it periodically. Of course, I realize that just because my fork crown hasn't failed yet doesn't mean it won't fail some day, but I'm not terribly worried about it. There are thousands of these fork crowns out in the world, and we've heard of three that have failed. Not exactly cause for alarm as far as I'm concerned.
Well-put. As with many things C&V, there is not enough hard data to say one way or the other definitively. I have also heard people say that this fork crown is no good because it lacks "tangs" going down the inside of the forkblades, but my Ron Cooper, Jack Taylor, Holdsworth/Claud, and old Peugeot also lack these and they are fine. I'm confident that after all the bending and shaping this fork went through, a crack would have shown itself, so I will likely just ride it and inspect it periodically (when I'm doing a rinko and I'm not pressed for time).