Today, at approximately 4 pm, I rode my new V-Rex into a WalMart parking lot, just passing through,
taking a short-cut home (1 mile to go) after a leisurely 20-mile spin. For the second time ever, I
hit a pot hole bad enough to knock my clip-on tail light out of its little homemade holder, so when
I heard the light skittering across the pavement I turned around, dodged some traffic, scooped it
up, put it in my pocket, and resolved to fix the flimsy holder when I got home. I had forgotten to
downshift far enough to accelerate easily out of traffic again. I had to mash my pedals good and
hard. That's when it happened.
Suddenly, my seat slide back with a loud "SNAP!" Luckily, my feet hit the ground to break my fall,
if only because I could no longer reach the pedals. I briskly walked the bike to safety, looked it
over, and couldn't believe what I saw.
The seat pan attaches to the urethene Rad-Loc assembly with a big hinge, the size of a door hinge
but twice as wide. That hinge is made of thin aluminum. Mine is mangled almost beyond recognition.
The metal is fatigued and ripped completely in two along the line of the screw holes that affix it
to the bottom of the seat.
Obviously, aluminum is nowhere near sturdy enough to tollerate the stress of my pedalstrokes -- and
I'm no Hercules.
I called Calhoun just a few minutes before their closing time, and they'll be closed all day
tomorrow, so I won't get any service or satisfaciton until Tuesday. But I did find out that all
Rad-Locs have the aluminum hinge, and I suspect that this is a common problem, else why would they
have a drawer full of spare Rad-Locs?
This is a new bike. It's a 2002, but I bought it just last month on closeout, and I've only put 160
miles on it. I did wipe out on ice once, but it wasn't even bad enough to scuff the seat cover. In
retrospect, I think there have been signs of metal fatigue for several days leading up to this. I've
felt strange little "clunks" on occasions when I pedaled hard, which I thought were due to my wobbly
underseat padlock bracket, but they were really "clunkier" than a mere wobbling weight. It never
occurred to me to inspect the seat hinge. Why would it? Bikes are supposed to be built to ride!
Has anyone else experienced a catastropic failure of this hinge? Does anyone else see signs of metal
fatigue on their's? I'm hopping mad about this right now. The hinge is really, really, ridiculously
under-engineered.