Quote: Originally Posted by jwardell
Ouch! Do you know exactly what was hitting things? Were you bottoming out and the spikes' added diameter to the wheel ripping into the wheel well liner? ...(snip)... If you didn't exceed the 30mph limit, then I agree Spikes should be reimbursing you, and even if you did, should have some explaining to do.
Actually, ad-hoc studs are very close to that ideal, since they don't require tires designed specifically to take studs. Next time, I wouldn't go without them, considering they are fast, cheap and legal in Quebec. Using and losing them does not cause damage either.
I rode with Blake with those Spider Spikes for 20+ hours, so I'm probably the 2nd most qualified person to answer. There were 2 causes of damages:
First, the spokes 'bend-away' through angular acceleration (centrifugal 'force') at low (<30mph) speed, hitting nearby trim, reflectors, wires and other stuff. This in turn is exacerbated by the wheel spacers that the manufacturer recommends. Either the recommendation is wrong, or they just aren't compatible with Blake's wheels, as they claim. This caused much of the damage, I suspect, but not having seen all of what Blake described in PA, I can't be sure if it was most of the expensive damage.
Second, by the end of the trip, only about half of the 32 spikes remained. We lost one spike on the way up, and the rest on the trip down at virtually the same or slower speed, indicating early wear and/or brittleness after being out in the cold (where you would expect to use them). They did have a tendency to be lost quickly if we exceeded 47mph, which is how we jettisoned a few. Every once in a while on Monday we saw them zing off in a random direction, but I suspect now that some others zinged off unseen under the hood. It's hard to imagine careening carbide tips to be healthy. It might explain one or two sounds we heard, but honestly the things made so much noise all the time you never know. On a humourous note, as we lost spikes, the frequency and possibly volume consistently decreased, exactly as one would expect, but also making it easier to hear each other talk.
Overall though, the device has serious deficiencies, considering that they can't handle the cold environment they're supposed to be used in, problems were expeerienced well below spec, and we never went anywhere near 100% over spec, the typical tolerance Blake and I would expect as engineers. The kicker is this though: the spikes are found in pairs on spokes, and 15 of the 16 spikes lost were the trailing spike of the pair, likely indicating a consistent manufacturing defect of some kind.
MinorRoadsKill
