Full carbon forks - pros and cons?

One advantage of full carbon forks - as opposed to those with an aluminium steerer - is that in a front-end crash you probably only have to replace your forks rather than your frame.

The aluminium steerer on my Mortirolo is why my frame disintegrated apparently. Sent the impact back rather than shattering. So I've been told, though I'm no metallurgist it sounds convincing.

@ Platini - I think its one of those things where it totally depends on the nature of the crash. A full carbon frame+fork hitting a stationary object at varying speeds is going to have varying out-comes.
Aluminium will usually fail before carbon as carbon is more elastic but there are just so many variables.

TBH, if you had a full carbon fork, you may not have had the catastrophic failure of the frame but could almost definitely have caused invisible damage that would have reared its head at a later date.

It wouldn't have saved your frame.

In what way did your frame break BTW? At the glue point etc?

Also, were you ok?

One advantage of full carbon forks - as opposed to those with an aluminium steerer - is that in a front-end crash you probably only have to replace your forks rather than your frame.

The aluminium steerer on my Mortirolo is why my frame disintegrated apparently. Sent the impact back rather than shattering. So I've been told, though I'm no metallurgist it sounds convincing.

worth knowing

. Eg: My ex-manager from work had a ski-pole (of all things) go through his spokes whilst travelling about 15mph. The fork legs snapped clean in half but didn't even bust a spoke. Obviously he was pretty badly hurt but got some nice shiny ec90's and some new wheels in the pay-off.

So basically, unless some guy in a park on ski's-with-wheels sticks his pole in your front wheel, you should just-about be ok.

I thought this ski pole story was going to go down the ski pole impaling route.
My medical instructor as a ski patroller showed us some pretty nice picks of some dude who'd managed to jam one through his leg.

Aluminium will usually fail before carbon as carbon is more elastic

Aluminium will probably fail first but your reasoning is wrong.

Sorry but it'sthe other way round, Aluminium has much lower modulus of elasticity. Basically this is a measure of how much force it takes to extend this material.

Carbon also doesn't really have an elastic deformation region at all, unlike aluminium where you will see the material stretching before it breaks completely carbon will reach it's fail point and then do so with little warning.

i've been riding full carbon kinesis attack forks for past couple of years and think of myself as an aggressive rider. never had any problems. banging up down curbs, alleycats, few falls but no major impacts. thinkin of replacing them at the moment, mainly as i have more money and want better stuff although i am considering swapping them out for ally steerer ones just for the piece of mind. i have an ally dolan so carbon suits them, wouldn't really consider running anything else