By Charles Pekow – You might suffer the misfortune of falling forward when your bike hits an object. You also might not be aware of structural defects on your bicycle. A few new studies looked at these problems.
Boom! Your front tire hits something on the road and over the front of the vehicle you land. Ouch! Such a “pitch-over” can occur when the forward momentum of the vehicle and rider gets stopped. A paper released by Engineering Systems Inc, a self-described “forensic engineering and scientific investigation firm,” looked at the issue from a unique perspective based on Newton’s Second Law of Motion, which states that the force of a moving object equals its mass multiplied by its acceleration.
The researchers examined differing heights of obstructions and how they interacted with the speed and weight of the bike and rider. The greater the force, the taller the obstruction needed to create a pitch-over.
See Bicycle Pitch-over Reconstruction Analysis at researchgate.net/publication/390391661_Bicycle_Pitch-over_Reconstruction_Analysis.
Meanwhile, an Australian study suggests that accidents may occur due to structural defects in bicycles that riders might not be aware of. These defects can arise from manufacturing issues or previous crashes and are often not visible. Researchers have yet to thoroughly examine what users know about these defects or how they inspect for them, according to the Cross-Sectional Survey to Investigate Bicycle Riders’ Knowledge and Experience of Structural Weakness in Bicycles in Australia.
About 25 percent of surveyed riders said they replaced a part they suspected had been damaged but more than a third didn’t see the need to check for flaws when buying a used bike. “Results suggest that structural weakness in bicycles is fairly common while awareness of the issue, and methods of testing for it, is limited,” the study says. It calls for more public education.
