on the other side of this coin, i have to pipe up in defense of those of us who ride major miles, on nasty pavement, and dont break axles.
im a bike messenger. i do 15000 miles a year on my work bike. my rear hub? 1950s era alloy-body sturmey-archer AW. in 4 years on this bike, rotating through 4 of these hubs (due to toasted rims or torn hub flanges, never due to problems with the internals, mind you), with dropouts that may well be misalligned now, but werent post-build (its a custom bike) ive had exactly *zero* axles break. in fact, i cant remember the last time i broke an axle on *any* of my bikes. im 6'1", 175 lbs, and i ride the work bike with loads of up to 200 lbs (beyond my body weight). all of this in downtown san francisco, with some of the nastiest pavement ive encountered outside of eastern europe.
trust me, my axles are subjected to worse stuff than yours :)
any correlation between breaking or not breaking axles and how often you ride, or how "hard" you ride (heck, or even how aligned your dropouts are...) can seem *very* tenous at times...
-joel
> You and your customers must be very, very lucky and the roads in
>your area must be very, very smooth. Go ahead and disagree, but
>discounting the vast majority of riders who may be riding around
>with misaligned dropouts,and considering only myself and my friends
>who I am certain have correctly aligned dropouts, I know that axles
>break. There is always a specific imapct that does the deed, but it
>happens. If none of you axles ever break, I can only assume one of
>two things:
>1) You have a super-de-duper ultra-precise method of aligning
>dropouts and anything else is inadequate.
>2) You don't ride very much or very hard. No offense intended, I'd
>be the first to admit that I haven't had so much as a flat in years,
>due to lack of miles.
--
joel metz : magpie@messengers.org : http://www.blackbirdsf.org/
bike messengers worldwide : ifbma : http://www.messengers.org/
po box 191443 san francisco ca 94119-1443 usa
==
i know what innocence looks like - and it wasn't there,
after she got that bicycle...