Technical > Wheels, Tyres and Brakes
Safe Skewers
Prince of Darkness:
--- Quote from: ourclarioncall on May 29, 2022, 01:45:24 am ---Interesting.
I’m still undecided on the direction to go regarding skewers
But every time I go down a hill at speed I just have this nagging anxiety 😄
If my forks had those lawyers lugs things I think I’d feel a bit more comfortable but possibly all Thorns forks are flat 🤔 not sure , it’s just what it looks like In images I’ve looked at
--- End quote ---
I think those lawyer lugs are a waste of time, they just make it more difficult to remove and refit the wheel. After you release the cam, you then have to loosen the tension nut at the other end to get the wheel off. When you put the wheel back on you have to fiddle around getting the tension right again. In the event of the QR mechanism failing whilst you are riding, the wheel might not fall off, but it will still be loose and cause you to crash!. In over 25 years, I have never had a QR mechanism fail whilst riding, only when removing the wheel (once).
mickeg:
--- Quote from: John Saxby on May 28, 2022, 07:53:45 pm ---From your earlier post, George:
--- Quote ---Otherwise, I am not familiar with people having problems with quick release.
--- End quote ---
Here's my example:
I switched from QR fore and aft on my Raven in 2015. This is what happened: I was in hilly country testing my switch from a 38T to 36T front ring. I stopped at the bottom of a hill, after the descent, because I'd heard a rattle from the rear of the bike. There was indeed a rattle, a clunky one: the rear wheel was loose, because the QR had worked loose. Dunno how -- I knew the cam mechanism, and had tightened it to my measure, pushing the heel of my hand against the lever, with my fingers 'round the seat stay. (This was well before arthritis in my thumbs, and I had a strong grip.)
I re-tightened the QR, returned home, and immediately ordered Halowheel skewers for all my bikes, save for my city bike. This has an Australian halo-like skewer with a pentagonal keyed skewer with one irregular (by design) flat.
No problems with loose wheels on any of the bikes in the seven years since.
--- End quote ---
You are the first one that I have heard this happen to, but in part when I say that I do not have a lot of trust in some of the people that say something like that happened when the rest of their story has inconsistencies.
I trust that when you say you closed your quick release properly, that it actually was closed properly.
I have heard of people being anti-social and opening quick releases on bikes in bike racks, for example at a school, then the bike owner gets on the bike, when they hit a bump hard enough to jolt the bike the wheel can fall out.
I suspect that was part of the reason that most new bikes these days (but not my Thorns) include an extra protrusion on the fork so that the front wheel can't completely drop out unless the release is opened much farther.
I filed those protrusions off my folding bike fork, as it was a major hassle to deal with when I had to remove the wheel to fold it. But I left them on my other bikes that have them.
mickeg:
In five more years we can celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the quick release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_release_skewer
When you consider how many people have raced with them, especially with the older style horizontal dropouts, if they were that much of a hazard we should have heard of multiple failures over the years.
***
A quick side note here, if you pack up your bike and put it in a box to go on an airplane somewhere, remove the front wheel skewer. When I was in Iceland, I met two Italians that had just arrived, they both had bent skewers and it was on a Sunday, they could not find any replacement skewers.
I was packing up to go home, if it was one person I would have given him mine, but it was two people so then needed two front ones.
***
But now that most new manufacturers are going to thru axle, quick releases will slowly disappear over the decades.
--- Quote from: Prince of Darkness on May 29, 2022, 01:02:54 pm ---...
I think those lawyer lugs are a waste of time, they just make it more difficult to remove and refit the wheel. After you release the cam, you then have to loosen the tension nut at the other end to get the wheel off. When you put the wheel back on you have to fiddle around getting the tension right again. In the event of the QR mechanism failing whilst you are riding, the wheel might not fall off, but it will still be loose and cause you to crash!. In over 25 years, I have never had a QR mechanism fail whilst riding, only when removing the wheel (once).
--- End quote ---
On my bikes that have them, I loosen the nut exactly four turns, then it is easier to install later, as four turns might not get me to the exact point I want but I am really close to it and only takes a few more seconds to fine tune it.
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