When Crabon Attacks

So if you keep abreast of Fredly affairs you may have seen that Enve crabon rims apparently eat tires:

Specifically, Enve says that catastrophic tire bead failures — on the sidewalls, right at the bead hooks — have been occurring more frequently than in years past. In addition, and more importantly, Enve contends that this is happening with other brand’s wheels as well, and is a problem directly related to the tires themselves.

"Ha, ha!" I laughed smugly.  "Silly Freds with their overpriced Enve wheels."  I mean come on, admit it: when you see the Enve logo on someone's bike you get the same kind of douche chills you get from a BMW, right? 

(Douche.)

For their part, Enve blames the tire companies:

“We called up the tire companies, and they were fairly dismissive about it, frankly,” Child said. “They tell us, ‘Oh, that’s a race-day-only tire that isn’t meant to go that many miles.’ But the problem is that nobody knows that; that’s not what their web sites say. So customers are buying the tires, shops are recommending them, and people are getting hurt. [The tire companies] are not owning it. That’s why this seems like a fairly aggressive approach, but I think we all collectively feel something has to be done to call this out. At a minimum, people need to know the risks they’re taking by running these tires on a day-in, day-out basis.”

Anyway, my smugness was cut off at the knees last week when, at the end of a longish (for me) ride I noticed this conspicuous sidewall tumor:

And yesterday when I finally got around to removing the tire I noticed my non-Enve crabon wheel had indeed eaten my "open tubular:"

Furthermore, when I inspected the inner portion of the rim sidewall with my disgusting, grubby, bitten fingers I found it was indeed quite sharp--like, "Wow, that doesn't seem like a good idea" sharp.

Of course I only have these crabon wheels in the first place because they came on the Renovo, but now that I know how dangerous they are I've immediately taken them out of service.

Just kidding!

No, I'm a total Fred, so what I did was just dig some old tires out of my reserves and put the wheels right back on the bike.

I mean I've already got them so I might as well.  Plus I'm fairly certain the casing on these tires is made from nylon so maybe they'll last longer. 

Or maybe not.

Either way, I have taken this as a sign that I need to dial back on the Fredness, so by way of realigning my priorities I headed out on a Surly with no derailleurs today without changing into special bikey clothes or anything:

I'm feeling better already.



from Bike Snob NYC https://ift.tt/2FShZVo