At 09:32 AM 12/6/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Having recently bought a used '71 International from an I-bob, and gotten
such a
>stem with the bike, I'm guessing that it's the correct one. Sort of a faux
>lugged look to it? The extension is hollow, and open at the rear? If so,
then
>it matches mine.
Duane, Steve, Brian, et al: That's the one. And to answer Brian's question, mine had the horizontal clamp bolt under the handlebars, not the vertical bolt out in front.
The catalogs pdf'ed at the Retro Raleigh site appears to
>confirm this. Personally, I like the looks of the stem, especially when
>polished up.
Yep, looks great, right up to the moment it decides it doesn't want to be attached to your bike anymore, and exits, stage left. I still cringe whenever I hear the film title "Breaking Away". The phrase has a whole different meaning in my twisted little world.
> Okay, what horror stories exist for this stem? My assumption was that if
>this stem was defective, it would have broken a long time ago. I'd be
>interested in hearing any evidence of this stem being failure prone.
See my previous message. See Sheldon Brown's website. Maybe yours would have failed by now, maybe not. Maybe they accidentally made a good one. I certainly wouldn't make that assumption. Is it worth taking the chance to find out? It's just a cheap crappy stem, easily replaced with any of a zillion other cheap stems like a GB or something nicer that are readily available for next to nothing. What do you save or gain by keeping it on the bike?
I had two Firestone tires completely disintegrate for no reason in 1987, and one a year before that I caught before it came totally apart, that maybe should have been enough warning to get ride of the others sooner. Did I believe the dealers who told me the tires weren't defective, or did I believe the evidence. Imagine my total lack of surprise over this latest round of tire failures. Do I buy Firestone tires? NO WAY! You couldn't give me a set of those miserable things. Haven't had a tire disintegrate since then, and I put a lot more miles on that same car before it was reduced to a pile of loosely associated rust particles, and several hundred thousand miles on subsequent vehicles. Flats, yes. Catastrophic failures, no. Do I still ride 70s vintage AVA stems? NO WAY! Haven't had a stem break since then. And screaming downhill on these narrow, twisting, potholed, Bambi infested, sometimes snow/gravel covered WV hills, my current stems (GBs included) take more of a pounding in one ride than that miserable AVA ever did in it's whole short life. My rides can be thrilling enough without any contributions from failed components. Moral of the storys (and several other exciting, dangerous, and totally undeserved near fatal episodes I won't bore you all with. You'll have to wait for the TV mini-series): you have the opportunity right now to be an active participant in your own safety and survival, or not. The choice is yours. Your fairy godmother ain't gonna save you if you guess wrong.
Perhaps if I or my friend had been present at each other's respective stem
failures, we might have seen the physical humor in each others predicament
as we each in our turn, bounced erratically from parked car to parked car
to curb to sprawled out on the ground or car trunk, trying to get things
slowed down, under control and stopped. Scared ****less while live traffic
whizzed past on the left. That's funny stuff when it happens to someone
else. We both survived that one. Hot **** that was fun! Let's do it again!!
That might be a great amusement park puke ride. Or not. I just can't
imagine why anybody would leave one of those damn stems on a bike that's
used for anything other than static display. Makes as much sense to me as
riding a Lambert with the original death fork, or playing Russian roulette
with an automatic pistol. I apologize for the rant, but this just isn't a
component to play games with.
>Admittedly, a hollow extension will be weaker than an equivalent solid
one. On
>the other hand, the quills of all stems are hollow, and they don't seem to
be
>particularly failure prone. I'd be also be concerned with the manufacturing
>technique (melt forging vs drop forging). The hollow extension makes me
wonder
>if it wasn't just cast, which would be a weaker method of manufacture.
We ride on frames constructed with tubing rather than solid bar stock. Hollow works, if done properly. My stem broke in the quill portion, so the expander bolt kept the extension and bars from getting too far away from the bike, and kept me from totally losing my balance and control. But I certainly wasn't going in the direction I wanted to. As crude as the surface quality was on those AVAs, they certainly looked like they were cast. Even after almost 30 years, I do remember some things quite vividly. Terror will do that. Of course, the old GBs look crude too, so who knows. Either way, it's sort of irrelevant. Cast or forged, those particular AVAs break.
Be careful out there. Larry "Pack your own parachute" Osborn