To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: FW: [CR] New Equipment Failure Rate
Greg Parker A2 MI USA
Wrote:
<Of course the competition's Engineers told you that Campy could have picked a better alloy - remember they were telling you this thirty years after Campy made that decision - more material options / tempers had been created in the interim!>
1983 minus 30 is 1953. I don't think Campy had cranks this early. Most of the aluminum alloy design was done during WWII. Campy chainrings were made using the best material, 7075-T6.
What I said was that the decision as to which alloy was going to be used was
made thirty years before your timeframe. I'll stand by that remark, as they
made early Prototypes I'm sure, and committed to the tooling well before
initial production. Tullio never did much of anything in a hurry!
>
> <Let me also guess that the sales of NR/SR cranks far, far exceeded the
> sales of Specialized cranks - so therefore the population of Campy
> cranks was much greater, as we've discussed recently relative to this
> exact issue of crank breakage.>
>
> Remember, Specialized cranks were used for all the MTB bikes Specialized
> sold, along with all the other bikes and aftermarket cranks. I would not
> be so sure of the greater number of NR cranks.
> Jim Merz
> Bainbridge Is. WA
>
Could be, but I still would suspect that the cranks that were made for nearly thirty years nearly unchanged, and that dominated the Pro and Amateur Pelotons and tracks around the world, were produced in higher total numbers than all of Specialized's road and track cranks added together (note I'm excluding MTB here - we need to try and keep things on an apples-to-apples basis IMO), but if anyone has hard data to the contrary, I'd believe it.
Regards,
Greg "rocket science" Parker