Why still design road frames for a 1″ fork?
With seemingly the rest of the world rushing toward the “new” (hardly) inch and 1/8 spec, one has to ask “why are those retrogrouches at Habanero not getting 100% on board with the new, improved spec?”. Simple – it’s not really “new and improved”. Let’s look at the reasoning behind the move to the “MTB spec” inch and 1/8 steer tubes in road bikes. Claim: By making the steer tube bigger, we can use less material and the fork will still be just as strong. Not necessarily. Certainly making a tube’s diameter bigger makes it stiffer – but you can’t necessarily shrink the walls on a fork’s steer tube without disastrous results. Also, it’s been suggested that an “over-stiff” steer tube concentrates stresses at the steer tube/crown interface, rather than distributing along the entire length as well as a 1″ steer tube might. And after all, the interface with the crown is where steer tubes will break, not in the middle. For comparison’s sake, let’s look at the difference in weight between typica
