I design and make a lot of parts that I use on my personal bikes. I always want to be riding on the best bike I can. I ride them hard and I get to see what goes wrong and how. This one suprised me.
I use a PVD stainless steel reducer on the top mount of the shock on my Giant Glory DH bike. It helps keep the wheel moving fast and smooth. Much more than OEM junk reducers. This is a non-offset 30mm version as the geometry of the bike is just lovely as is.
I figured that the parts that I had made were light enough considering this is DH but also plenty strong. They weren’t. Dam. Maybe under perfect conditions they’re just the ticket, but downhilling at Northstar is going to find any weakness your bike has and exploit it and try to break it. The endcap cracked (I think?) causing things to loosen up. Then the tube began to mushroom. It’s hard to know what began the failure but we can all see how it ended. I’d made on on-course adjustment to the bolt while riding thinking that it had gotten lose, not knowing at the time that things had gone wrong.
Below is the cracked end cap and mushroomed tube. Seriously jank. Behind is the heavier duty replacement that addresses the failures.
