On Saturday, July 27, 2019 at 9:34:12 AM UTC-7, sms wrote:
On 7/27/2019 7:34 AM, jbeattie wrote:

snip

The fact is, we don't know what deaths were or were not caused by carbon fork failures.

We pretty much do. The fork fails, the rider crashes and dies. The death
is attributed to fork failure. Yes, there may have been contributing
factors to the fork failure other than a manufacturing defect and a fork
that never had experienced any trauma may not have broken.

There are no seatbelts on a bike, and when a rider hits a rock or wall or curb or dog, he or she is going to get launched. What happens to the bike is often irrelevant -- but when a rider gets off the ground and sees a broken fork or frame, it is immediately presumed the crash was caused by the failure rather than vice-versa. Yes, there are CF for failures and recalls, and I'm not giving the industry a free pass, but considering the millions of CF forks in existence, there clearly is no epidemic of CF fork-induced deaths.

Not an epidemic, but about Phase 3 of a pandemic.

Just to be safe you should order some Rivendell forks when they are back
in stock
https://www.rivbike.com/products/carbonomas-steel-fork-1-1-8-threadless-curved.
But there is no disc brake model. Soma Fabrications is another good
source for you to consider when replacing all the carbon forks in your
fleet with steel forks, see https://www.somafab.com/parts/forks.

That high speed crash into a stone culvert a couple of years ago pretty much showed just how strong Carbon Fiber forks are. I dropped down into the culvert at least at 20 mph. The shock of the sudden stop made every bone in my body hurt but luckily no serious damage. Later looking at the fork layup just above the drop-out on the right side of the fork was cracked.

Originally I assumed that was why I lost control of the bike but later with a clear head it dawned on me that if it had been cracked and that caused my loss of control that it would have broken off in the extremely violent collision.

So that Colnago fork really took a collision strike FAR above what you could expect and had relatively minimal damage. If I wasn't afraid that every bone in my body was broken I could have carefully ridden it home.