I had a pretty serious accident about a month ago. Spent three weeks in the hospital. I can’t really remember what happened or why I crashed. Severed my esophagus, trachea and larynx, broke several vertebrae and ribs. Was a bad scene.
Home now and looking at my bike. The thru axle on the front wheel is severed and the front wheel no longer turns. I’m trying to figure out if this was caused by impact with the guard rail that did all the damage to me, or failed and was what caused me to flip over the handlebars – since I don’t remember why I crashed and nothing hit me.
Anyone ever seen a failed through axle and if so does the one in this photo look like it failed due to an impact?
by Global_Broccoli_3211
2 Comments
Looks like wear and corrosion
the idea of taking away steel axles and skewers and replacing them with aluminium hollow stuff always seemed like a bad idea to me. It could of easily been broken in the accident rather than being the cause of it, Steel axles hollow or solid often get broken by impacts. Less likely at the front due to not being so weight bearing but one brick in the road or a bad pot hole….
I cant see enough corrosion to say, Aluminium corrosion looks like white powdery fluff/dust/snow and it would have to be pretty severe. Its inherently a weaker material.
It could have been already fractured or had metal fatigue that led to a break and then bad steering but i think impacting a guard rail at some speed would be more than enough to cause such a break.
likely one will never know but my thoughts are that corrosion wasnt the cause and we will not know without better inspection or multiple photos from better angles if there any signs of it being busted for a while.
For example some oxidisation differences between the edges of the break might give us a clue that a crack was there for a while but without that, metal fatigue is almost impossible to spot/predict