It was William who introduced the concept of S-N curves, not Jim. I don't think he misused science in his explanation. That said, it's somewhat simplistic to reduce the complicated fatigue life of bicycles to relationships discovered in controlled lab settings.
In the real world, bike parts do break, even if they're made of steel. This is observed reality at least once a week at my job. If you dig into the science of why things break, you can certainly learn a lot of terminology and study endless log-scale graphs. You can get a PhD in the subject, which I tried once. Even the smartest guy or gal in the room can only begin to guess what sorts of stresses a handlebar will endure (or has endured), what scenarios will lead to eventual failure, or how long that will take. As somebody pointed out, even a good bar can fail prematurely if clamped improperly in the stem. What of faulty heat treating or surface defects or undetectable debts and dings that become stress risers? I've only just scratched the surface of muddying the waters of science and its predictions... Nitto makes their best guess, erring on the side of safety, and says 5 years of use. Obviously many bars last much longer, and a few don't even make it to 5 years. Personally, I'm not concerned about this arbitrary number. If you are concerned, I say buy a new bar. It's worth $100 or whatever for peace of mind. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
