Was lucky to walk away with just a wounded knee from this one.
First time ever that a component failed with such terrible timing for me. I guess I should learn from this and replace parts on my unicycles regularly. I normally inspect for cracks and listen for weird creaks (which lead to me catching and replacing a cracking seatpost a few weeks ago, before it could fully fail on me), but I guess I won’t be able to catch everything beforehand.
Ironically, I had just ordered new kneepads because my old ones were worn out and starting to slip. I also was thinking about replacing this unicycle, but was planning to take these pedals to the new one… I probably have another week to figure out a new pedal/unicycle while I wait for the skin on my knee to come back.
Ouch, that was ugly. Could easily have broken an ankle on that one.
I’m guilty of riding stuff forever. Part of it is the idea that something that has survived a long time must be solid. Why replace it with something new and unproven? It’s not totally wrong - there’s that bathtub curve where a lot of failures happen early, and then not for a long time - but it’s probably not a great plan. And I do inspect stuff, but there’s no way you’d find something inside your pedal spindle.
Ouch indeed… You’d never have seen that there, it seems unexpected, you could imagine a crack growing from the root of a thread but not so much there, I suppose it is the most loaded area though.
I had it apart to regrease it two weeks earlier, but I didn’t look closely…
The weekend before last weekend, a friend of mine broke a pedal spindle too (he was furtunate enough to have a safer bail), so while I think for most riders, the outer cage will be unusable before you have fatigued the spindle enough to fail, if you do enough drops, this is something that can happen. I think if you don’t do many larger drops, a pedal can probably last you forever.
I actually quite liked this pedal design, nice and large radius from the threaded part towards the rest of the spindle, fairly big diameter (at least compared to some of the more slim pedals). I guess I’ll just start to cycle pedals down from the downhill unicycle to a less stressed uni every few years…
Nimbus (presumably steel frame, but the Oracle’s too) unis are as strong or stronger than KH. You pretty much only buy lighter weight and more colors/the KH signatures with more expensive parts.
In fact I’ve seen more broken “high end” parts than mid level, but I think that is biased because the people that ride harder tend to use higher end parts.
