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Interesting stuff. My Croix de Fer's steel disc fork weighed over 1.4kg - practically a frame in itself - I wonder how much innovation went into that, or if it was simply a safe play with overbuilding it. In all fairness, they're pretty sturdy bikes in general. Ended up swapping it for a carbon one which weighed half of that. 1 1/8" headtube though.
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Remember he built the frames for Roberts. He knows a thing or two when it comes to that.
GideonPARANOID
anidel
@.gaz.
I contacted Devlin and showed them the Woodrup failure.
He said he'd seen a few failures of this type, all caused by the same design fault: There is a massive step in material thickness from the mount to just the fork blade, which causes a very focused stress concentration in that area. By putting a reinforcing plate on the back and extending away from the mount you can spread the stress over a bigger area and lessen its affect on the materials.
He even thought it would be possible to do this on stainless blades like 953.... which would be fucking amazing. But I feel like I need to ask around a bit more and find out if anyone else has done it / seen failures / kept all their teeth.
I'm not fully against the idea of innovation, but the fact that I can't find any other examples makes me think twice.
More research....!