• Here's the No-Fork fork. Show me how I'm not simple...

    Even posting only half the story, you still fail. As any fule kno, the fork crown area has to do some interesting things, which don't change just because it's missing. As well as seating the bearing on an external step, it is normal to change the guage of the steerer between the lightly stressed top and the highly stressed crown joint, and similarly the blade, whether there is one or two, works best with a taper guage, to provide resilience and the necessary strength. A disc brake mount and the highly asymmetric hub loading also add complexity to proceedings. A No-Fork which handles and rides as well as a boring old 531 3-tube assembly will need some fairly intricate butting. Sure, you could make something which rides like a scaffold pole out of, er, a scaffold pole, but you surely wouldn't settle for something which was not at least the equal of a conventional fork in every regard.

    When we get to the bottom, which you conveniently omit, we find that it is necessary to mount a very precisely aligned and bored tube to accept the wheel bearings. Do you really think that's simpler than a couple of conventional fork ends? I grant you that we have experience now of pressing bearings into carbon fibre, and the No-Fork may actually be simpler to mould than a conventional monocoque CF fork, so you only have to get it to meet the usual performance and safety requirements while keeping it down to around 500g to be in the fight. That it can be done is not in doubt - Cannondale have shown the way. The Lefty essentially solves all the structural problems you will come up against (albeit not the assembly issues, since Cannondale chickened out and put the brake on the wheel side of the fork), although it does seem to take a 30% price premium over conventional forks of similar quality to do it.

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