>A crank failure is much less dangerous than a fork failure. You can
>still control your bike if the crank fails, and bring it to a safe stop.
John,
I like your optimism. If your cranks, bottom bracket or pedals fail while you are out of the saddle, it is hard to avoid a crash, as shown by many amateur and pro racers, including Laurent Fignon (wasn't it him?), who broke collarbones and other body parts when their cranks (or early SR Ti BBs with hollow spindles) failed.
Fork failure needn't be associated with injury either - I once was very lucky that my fork (highly regarded American custom frame, silver-brazed and all, not some junky Viscount) failed after a screaming downhill, just as I was spinning up the other side... ;-)
I think that failure of any essential part of the bike, whether seatpost (Campy carbon death seatposts anybody? I once saw five failed seatposts lined up at a local dealer), handlebars, stem, crank, wheels or forks, can cause great harm or be harmless, depending on luck and circumstances.
I think what is overlooked in Campagnolo's defense is that these cranks were designed for racing. A lot of people will not like this statement, but racing is not very stressful for many components: Not only are most racers lightweight and smooth pedalers (at high cadences and thus low torque), but the torque involved in a race situation is much less than what occurs during a fast start from a traffic light. (Proof: With horizontal dropouts, you never pull the wheel sideways in an all-out sprint, but it does happen occasionally when you start from a light.)
The same applies to breaking rear axles - I raced on Campy Record wheels for more than 10 years, potholes and all, with not a single broken axle. My clincher wheelset, on the same bike, same axles on Campy early Chorus hubs, used for commuting, went through axles regularly. That is also why tandems can be so devastating for equipment, even with not extremely strong teams. (I believe the same applies to cars - a 1000 hp Formula 1 race car of the 1980s can get away with a much smaller clutch than a 350 hp truck with huge amounts of torque.)
Of course, in a race, you don't start from a standstill very often, whereas American commuters do.
In Italy, few people would even consider commuting on a Campy-equipped race bike... I believe that American cycling habits stress bikes more than what they were designed to do.
Of course, that does not mean that it would not have been better if Campy had got rid of that stress riser in the spider a little early than the 1980s... According to Daniel Rebour, Campy cranks started failing as they went from the first model with the thicker arm to the thinner arms in an effort to reduce Q factor, around 1962 (for the source, check the CR archives).
But when a true problem appeared, like with the early Ti BBs, they did redesign them rather quickly...
Just for the record, does anybody know whether Fignon went down because of a crank or a BB failure? Most failures in races in Germany that I remember were BBs, not cranks... -- Jan Heine, Seattle Editor/Publisher Vintage Bicycle Quarterly c/o Il Vecchio Bicycles 140 Lakeside Ave, Ste. C Seattle WA 98122 http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com