1ofBTNFixed-
Do you think it’s safe to ride on?
I think it will get too annoying to ride before it becomes too dangerous to ride, after allowing for your risk tolerance which let you ride a 20 year old plastic wheel with a dubiously designed boutique hub before you realised it was broken 🙂
If it really is a de-bonded flange, the terminal failure mode is the flanges getting closer together as the carbon barrel wears down by fretting. This makes the spokes go loose and maybe the bearing cartridges walk out of the flanges or along the axle, depending on how they are retained. As it wears, the compressive stress on the barrel actually goes down, so exploding into carbon fibre shrapnel is unlikely. If the bearings are fully constrained without the barrel existing at all (this is a possible design), then as the barrel fails the preload on the bearings rises, and eventually they break, wear out or just squeak so loudly that you realise you're not cursed by a constant imperceptible rising road but by massively increased bearing friction.
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To paraphrase Tester; your hub is only going to get worse, but will probably not be the immediate cause of your death. Nuke-Proof are named somewhat optimistically.
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gbj_tester
ColinTheBald
Flange de-bonded from the barrel, so it rocks back and forth as the load reverses once per revolution. I'm just guessing, but it wouldn't be at all surprising that a piece of carbon fibre glued to a piece of aluminium in the 1990s would do that, it's common enough on frames of that era which used a similar construction.