Whoever it is downvoting you, it ain't me! Anyway, you make a fair point. It is probably sensationalist of me to single out RaceFace on this, especially when it comes to modern carbon crank failure images - my googling shows up a pretty similar number of both RF Next and SRAM and e13 cranks in various stages of death. And this points out that maybe I should retract cranks in general from the above narrative, since obviously they must still be failing in the numbers that they used to "back in the day".
Except for the fact that we didn't chronicle everything failing quite so obsessively in the pre-internet, barely digital era. F'rinstance, I cannot find one single image of the three Tioga Revolver cranks in a row that I had split right where the chainring locating pin was welded onto the back side of the rings. And, damn, I blew about two solid hours yesterday looking for an image of Larry Hibbard at the '93 Worlds in Metabief when he finished the race with a stick jammed in his stem after his handlebars snapped in half. Couldn't find squat.
But to your point, mea culpa. However, I did pretty easily manage to find some old broken RF Turbine images; it took typing "broken raceface crank" into google image search and then scrolling to the second row, past the first row of entirely modern carbon carnage.
Feb. 24, 2022, 10:34 a.m. - Mike Ferrentino
Whoever it is downvoting you, it ain't me! Anyway, you make a fair point. It is probably sensationalist of me to single out RaceFace on this, especially when it comes to modern carbon crank failure images - my googling shows up a pretty similar number of both RF Next and SRAM and e13 cranks in various stages of death. And this points out that maybe I should retract cranks in general from the above narrative, since obviously they must still be failing in the numbers that they used to "back in the day". Except for the fact that we didn't chronicle everything failing quite so obsessively in the pre-internet, barely digital era. F'rinstance, I cannot find one single image of the three Tioga Revolver cranks in a row that I had split right where the chainring locating pin was welded onto the back side of the rings. And, damn, I blew about two solid hours yesterday looking for an image of Larry Hibbard at the '93 Worlds in Metabief when he finished the race with a stick jammed in his stem after his handlebars snapped in half. Couldn't find squat. But to your point, mea culpa. However, I did pretty easily manage to find some old broken RF Turbine images; it took typing "broken raceface crank" into google image search and then scrolling to the second row, past the first row of entirely modern carbon carnage.