Originally Posted by abdon

The snag is that I'm in Alaska, I ended up having to ship the fork and frame to the lower 48 to get it powder coated and that alone was not cheap. After many many many delays the bike is finally assembled, I'm not willing to take it apart and start burning even more money for this. Not on this interaction. Another snag; I'm about to fabricate custom racks for this bike, I rather build them from the get go as a 6-point bolt on (canti studs, mid fork, drops) plus over tire stiffener loop. Sounds like a fabricated long washer from billet aluminum would take care of not adding additional crushing stress on the blade, it can be made to hug a larger area.

Maybe I have lived a sheltered life but I have never seen a steel fork having a catastrophic failure without an ungodly amount of either rust of blunt force trauma. Obviously a fork without a hole is going to be relatively stronger than one without, but I use the word relative because in practicality it should be strong enough, as most are already overbuilt for their intended purpose. I do appreciate that folks want to have an overabundance of caution; Cino Cinelli himself was leery of making handlebars out of aluminum instead of steel. Everybody that has been at this long enough remembers how folks thought carbon on a bike was suicidal.

I did a whole lot of searching for pictures of steel fork failures, I could not find a single one showing a failure from this source. Interestingly enough it seems that counterintuitively, a hole lower on the blade would be less stressful than a hole in the higher portion of the blade. Most fork failures from blunt force trauma are most likely higher up the blades where there is even more steel because the higher you go, the more leverage the force have to bend it. Sort of like the same way that is easier to bend and break a stick from the middle rather than closer to the end.