as I already stated I have had the same experience from the china brands.

It seems you would be happier if you quit buying carbon fiber components altogether.

I don't have any experience with Carbon Forks, but I wonder and hope this is not the standard. I say this as over the past years I have had to return tires bought from Brand Name reputable suppliers/manufacturers after finding defects. At least I was able to identify the defects and return the items before use or failure. I don't know if there is an economical way to test Carbon Fiber components. Non-destructive methods would be costly involving ultrasound, thermal imaging, even X-rays.

We probably should cut up some trashed brand name forks and see if they too have hidden defects or manufacturing short cuts. And I would not be surprised if there were.

Not that I am in the market for a carbon fork on any of my Franken bikes, but still, "I gots ta know"...

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...6549ca0cfb.jpg

No need to apologize. You played it perfectly!

It would be interesting to see a comparison between a more expensive high end carbon fork and a cheaper lesser known brand. Cut them both and see what they look like on the inside.

The claim is not that high-end companies never have failures that get past their QC department, but that it's less likely to happen with high-end manufacturers than it is with very low cost manufacturers. Your example of the Cane Creek fork does not contradict that.

Sure would be nice if part of the $1k price tag included an X-ray check before shipping. Even better if they include that in the packaging with a visible serial number, or at least an ability to check later by serial number like we do with vehicles and VINs for crash reports.

YOUR STATEMENT: MY REPLY: THEN YOU SAY THIS, WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CLAIM: I will repeat: I have never seen anyone on bf claim that the "high-end companies" don't make mistakes. That claim is very different than believing that those same high-end companies have lower defect rates.

Your claim that all cf components have the same probabilities of being defective, regardless of manufacturer, is pure speculation and likely incorrect.

Not surprising, in China, they use chopsticks.

Ultrasound doesn't have to be costly. There are depth gauges that don't do imaging, and should have caught this. It's a little box that looks much like a digital voltmeter, with a wand attachment and tells you depth to the next void. They seem to be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars... I found one listed for $55 but I am betting it's a typo.

This was a good catch and I'm glad you are not riding it.

The international bike industry seems gigantic to me, but maybe the amount of carbon used falls between the cracks compared to the major consumers of carbon fiber, explaining the lack of oversight.

Sounds a bit as though carbon fiber for bikes is still in the Wild West stage of development. Reminds me of what is probably my all-time favorite quote on the topic, posted on a long-gone bike chat site around 1997, by an industry veteran (who calls himself "bulgie" on Bike Forums).

In reference to the standard of engineering of racing bike technology in the Golden Era of the '70's and '80's, he wrote something like "They reduced the weight of components until the death toll became prohibitive, and then added a little material back."

I wasn’t suggesting this fork was made in China, just pointing out the false dichotomy of expensive vs. made in China (or “China fork”).

So essentially you lied to people to expose nothing? Cool. Products of all kinds have warranty issues but the difference between them is the support afterwards. According to you Cane Creek wanted their fork back to see what was going wrong so they could solve it, the Chinese company said "keep the fork" meaning we don't care, we aren't going to solve the problems hope the new one is fine but if not our factory will just pump out just enough that hopefully one will be OK.

Having done as much warranty work as I have I see the differences between quality and not. The good ones wanted their stuff back to figure out the issues and solve it for next time, the cheap stuff usually was a toss and we will just send new ones because of course sending it back and having someone actually look at it and solve what happened and pay for R+D to not have that problem for the future.

Everyone has problems, humans are imperfect and humans are behind everything being made in the world however the good humans know that yes they can make mistakes and would rather solve them than just replace parts over and over. Also generally a company like Cane Creek has a lot fewer problems, yes they had a problem here but that is probably not a common one.

I know there are a lot of CC fakes as well, how do I know I have seen them and talked to them about it. The eeBrakes are commonly faked by Alibaba and his 40 thieves and I can imagine other things from them being faked as well so it is also possible you didn't buy from an authorized dealer given your history.

Way to dig your heels in. '[..] They are taking a lot of time to design products that will last and do more quality control. When you try to save money going elsewhere you pay for it just after purchase sometimes quite heavily.' - how much QC time did they spend on this, and if it was more than zero how did they miss massive voids? You're always going 'you get what you pay for' but when someone drops a grand and gets a faulty, dangerous POS you're still sticking for CC...
Would your first post be different if OP stated it was CC in the original post? Would you still 'caveat emptor' on the cheap stuff and extol the value of going for established, more expensive brands?

Ahhh was wondering when you would stick up for junk and bad posts. Caveat Emptor still applies sorry to burst your little bubble but it will always apply. Considering CC is asking for the fork back and has replaced it they have done pretty well, if you bothered to read the post I went into all of that.

My tune doesn't change the text would have if the OP had been truthful from the beginning and I would have wondered what CC had said and if they said anything but what the OP claimed I would have been surprised considering at least 6 or 7 of my bikes have CC headsets two have eeBrakes one has their cross levers and also have an eeSlik post so I like their products and haven't had issues and I cannot recall a time of having to do a warranty with them.

In the end my original post about quality and support was correct, go figure. Yes they had an issue as any company does considering it is run by imperfect humans but it is how they handle it afterwards which according to the OP handled it like professionals who make quality products.

I don't think you understand how QC works. With the exception of a few special industries, QC involves checking a sampling of the products, not every unit that comes off the line.

I'm not veganbikes , but my answer to this question is "yes." Because I understand QC, probabilities, and stuff like that.

See post #15.

IKR. Saying “A lot of crappy stuff comes from X” doesn’t mean that defective stuff doesn’t come from Y.

In Touring there was a recent thread about Ortlieb panniers, which are considered by many around the world as some of the best, if not the best. When I got mine 15 years ago, one of them had a defect. The seller, who was a well respected etailer in the touring world, acknowledged that Ortlieb had a short-lived QC issue and quickly replaced the defective bag even before I returned the defective one.

”It” happens.

This is incorrect. Your claim is objectively incorrect. Like it isn't actually something to debate because it's been shown that the liklihood isn't the same.

Where was it proven that brand name stuff has less defects? If the companies were non-profit we'd be guaranteed the extra money was going into things like research, higher sampling QC, employee wages, etc.. - but they aren't.

It's entirely possible the entire portion of the higher price tag is being used for profit, not paying the factory to do more QC and trash more defective product without shipping it out. The factory is often even the same, like how Giant makes bikes for big brands. So the non-big brand actually has less overhead since there's one less layer of bloat to pay for (execs, managers, marketing and branding, etc.). Entirely possible cutting out the middleman also allows spending more on QC in the same way it's entirely possible a higher price tag does.

As someone who worked for a popular brand manufacturing a popular product once, I have to say, a lot of the decisions did not lead to higher quality at all. Management would make crazy decisions like force us to use a decade old, out of production, out of support Texas Instruments chip instead of some modern option, and we'd spend month after month struggling with it - all because using it improved the bottom line.

Do you really think a larger company that specializes in high quality bicycle components is really just using the higher price tag for profit? ENVE for instance sponsors pro-teams you think they aren't doing R+D on their product because a lot of the cheap rando companies don't do it? You must be crazy.

Yes there are certainly products that have high price tags and don't justify it but there is very little from Cane Creek that is not high quality, long lasting stuff. Having used it for well over a decade and continuing to use it I haven't had issues but have seen cheaper headsets fail. That is why I use Cane Creek even at the 40 series they are super reliable and long lasting. The eeBrakes which aren't their design but they are making and selling them now and updating for modern times, are some of the finest rim brakes EVER! (and lightest as well)

Many of these companies in the cycling space who make quality products also put a lot of R+D time into their products to make them faster and more aerodynamic or lighterweight or better in some way. Sometimes yes they have some poor ideas and sometimes they make ideas with profit in mind but they aren't just purely greedy individuals most of them are cyclists who enjoy the sport and want to do better.

In the bicycle world, we have seen a lot of problematic products out of the big name brands throughout the years. Most recently the assploding Dura Ace/Ultegra cranksets from Shimano. Cranksets have been with us for over 100 years now. There is no reason for a crankset to assplode. And yet the most respected brand in the business did just that- put out a clearly defective assploding crankset. As always- trouble happens when people 'innovate'. They have clever ideas, and in their excitement they forgot to test them thoroughly in the real world. This is how we ended up with 2 piece cranks that end up in two pieces, 3 spoke wheels that become 2 spoke wheels, glued joints that come unglued, rocket beams that break, threaded nipples that yank out threads, etc
Now China. 90% of the bikes sold in the US came from ..... China. I trust that the people making the vast majority of our bikes know how to make them. Also- they don't innovate. They just mass produce tried and true products.

No we haven't. And, in your primary example, the particular model of crankset that was recalled made up a fraction of cranksets sold by Shimano, and less than 1% of the cranksets listed in the recall actually had problems.

Where did the 1% number come from now?