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I had decided to keep them before discovering they may be a risk. I agree the damage is probably as little as it could be and I'm considering my options with them.
They are minimals with king headset but I'm unsure if it was due to the previous headset being loose for a while. I never saw them between the change and can't remember if it was there when I last greased the bearings.
A few sources I found reckon loose headsets are to blame but there seems to be several theories about how it can happen.
I'm considering gluing a metal pipe inside for safety if I decide to keep.
Edit: the top bearing cover is a tight fit on the steerer but it is a good cm above the highest band. The rest of the headset doesn't seem to touch the steerer but I could be misunderstanding how it all works.
3c70-
Leuscher teknik has done a youtube video titled steerer fork failure. The first fork he talks about is a bianchi fork with the rings from the compression ring worse than yours plus a couple of other issues as well but he did say it can kill you so this fork was taken off the road. Sorry i can't post a working link but should be pretty easy to find.
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I think it can be the actual headset cup that makes contact with the steerer or the very edge of the bearing or something.
IMO it’s a pretty fatal flaw in King headsets and it’s very telling that they defended their decision not to pay the licence fee to use the wedge system by saying their design was better yet changed to a wedge design as soon as the licence ran out.
It seems like it’s a known problem (especially among mechanics, show any decent mech that steerer and they’ll know you’ve used a King headset) but for some reason no one wants to call CK out on it. Like CK stuff holds such reverence that folk don’t want to talk ill of it.
All I know for certain is that I’ve personally never come across that kind of steerer damage that was caused by anything other than a King headset.
I do have a King headset on one of my bikes (it was in a bundle of stuff I bought which included the fork with the damage that I mentioned in my last post) but I threw away the CK scuff washer and top cover and run it with a wedge and top cover off an £8 eBay fake.
I don’t think the structural integrity of your fork will be affected really. Afaik the damage happens via wear and not compression so the damage you see on the surface should be the extent of it if you know what I mean.
Retro_Bastard
M_V
Minimals that’d been used with a king headset?
I noticed the band in your ad.
King headsets are shite for this.
In this case it doesn’t look very significant. If you lay something like a steel rule or Stanley blade up against the steerer it’ll illustrate a lot more clearly how much (or little) wear there is.
I’ve bought an alloy steerer fork with quite a significant groove (also from a King headset) but the price was right in that case and I would definitely be more reticent to buy a carbon fork with any kind of damage.
If the damage to your steerer is as minor as it looks and you can photograph them to show that more clearly then you’ll probably get them sold for a decent amount.