Originally Posted by
JYPC
Wrong.
I have had Spinergy wheels, Aerospoke wheels, 36 hole spoke wheels, 32 hole spoke wheels, disc wheels, etc. and never once did any of them explode from hitting a pothole at an above moderate speed. I rode the Spinergy Rev X wheels (front and back) for 6 months and put over 1000 miles on them, still as solid and true as when I received them used with well over 5000 miles on them.
I'm not buying into the hype of exploding wheels, tragic losses and catastrophic failure.
People need to just chill out and not worry about what other people do and just ride their bicycles.
Ride the wheels for aesthetics, pleasure, weight, who the **** cares.
Whether or not you buy into it is one thing, but there is a documented history of failure with the Spinergy wheels.
Additionally, if you are going faster than a certain speed, it is actually less likely that there will be something wrong with just a pot hole as your wheel has less time to descend into the hole and impact the other side. you can take this to the extreme (albeit physically impossible), but at a certain point, you will be going fast enough that you will not even feel a bump.
Don't take me the wrong way, i am not against CF wheels, in fact if i had hundreds of dollars to spare, (and enough to cover a new set if something did happen) i might get some too. i am just saying that just because you were going fast, and nothing happened, does not mean everything people are saying about safety is wrong.
as for who cares what people ride, i agree. i am all for letting people ride whatever they want be it for fashion, for safety, or a downright death trap. The people that are so against it are mostly afraid that:
1) if/when something happens to a skilled/unskilled rider that is on a fixed gear or single speed bike, "upstanding citizens" who like to outlaw fun will move against the entirety of the sport that we all enjoy, and
2) that some of the people that are seen with bikes purely for fashion are ***holes (some of the people with "sensible" bikes are ***holes too, i know this for a fact) and due to their higher profile bikes, the impression they make on people outside of the fixed/singlespeed world is far more than someone with a fairly unremarkable bike.
believe me, i have seen this argument for years applied to various things like components for motorcycles, or even motorcycles as a whole.
sorry for the rant, the whole argument is somewhat silly, and it seems that every single sport i like has a different version of the same dang thing