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[PeteF]

There's got to be more to this than meets the eye.
I've been messing with REs for years and never heard of this before.

[Cranky]

I suspect you are doing something wrong.

[Adrian]

I have heard of alloy fork sliders snapping higher up due to braking forces proving too much for a particular casting, but until this thread I hadn't heard of the spindle clamp failing on this sort of fork until now, and for one person to have this same component fail exactly the same way THREE TIMES is a little strange, n'est-ce pas?

If you're doing things by the book, we should at least thank you for being a magnet for all the substandard disk brake fork sliders so that it doesn't happen to anyone else.

A.

[stinkwheel]

I'm trying to think of something I'm doing wrong too but I'm at a bit of a loss. Been riding and maintaining bikes for 23 years now and most of them have a clamp of some sort on at least one fork leg. I've only ever had this happen once before and that was on a Jawa 350. I put that down to the fact that it had been crashed down a ravine with a sidecar attached, then about a year later run into the side of an Audi with enough force to bend the forks and write-off the car.

I've so-far entirely failed to snap the traditional fork clamps on my older bullet, despite them having a reputation for being fragile.

[Adrian]

Just a thought, could this be another case of the curse of the torque wrench?

A.

[stinkwheel]

Nope, it was nipped plus about half a turn.

As you might imagine, this being the third one, I was being pretty cautious and a 10mm spanner isn't exactly a breaker bar.

I'd expect to be able to tighten this type of clamp fully closed anyway? Surely the bolt should snap before the casting? It's through-drilled with an M6 bolt and nylok nut, most of them on my other bikes are threaded into the alloy and it wasn't as tight as I'd have done one of those up.

[stinkwheel]

Incidentally, it also turned out that the left fork leg (the non-clamped one) was very badly made too. That one wasn't from our hosts, it was from everyones favourite online auction site. I'd swapped both legs out because I couldn't get a powdercoated right hand fork leg anywhere (all sold out because they broke?).

In any case, I'd had the axle in and out a few times trying to get the brake to work properly and had just concluded that the calliper lugs and the facing on the fork leg that the wheel spacer butts against were so far from paralell that the calliper was trying to rotate to get the pads flush on the rotor. I was getting ready to blue (ok, marker pen) the facing up to see where it was making contact with the spacer and start sanding it square. I didn't even have the wheel in when the clamp broke, just the axle with the spacer on.

[PeteF]

Incidentally, it also turned out that the left fork leg (the non-clamped one) was very badly made too. That one wasn't from our hosts, it was from everyones favourite online auction site. I'd swapped both legs out because I couldn't get a powdercoated right hand fork leg anywhere (all sold out because they broke?).

Well, there is a LOT of rubbish out there in Ebay land. Was it perhaps delivered from India?

[Adrian]

If you're faced with the one powder-coated and one polished dilemma fork slider dilemma, the yellow can Nitromors, for all its chemical downgrading in the name of health and safety, will still just about soften Indian powder coating on fork sliders enough for a rotary wire brush to clean it all off, and leave a pretty decent almost polished finish in the process, which fine wet and dry and some solvol would finish off pretty well, if that's your thing.

A.

[Cranky]

Nope, it was nipped plus about half a turn.

As you might imagine, this being the third one, I was being pretty cautious and a 10mm spanner isn't exactly a breaker bar.

I'd expect to be able to tighten this type of clamp fully closed anyway? Surely the bolt should snap before the casting? It's through-drilled with an M6 bolt and nylok nut, most of them on my other bikes are threaded into the alloy and it wasn't as tight as I'd have done one of those up.

Nipped is enough if your nip is the same as my nip, another half a turn is not necessary, and no it will not ever close up and was not meant to.