With that out of the way; here's a brief rant: You do not need a through axle on a rigid fork. If you want this setup for convenience when swapping suspension/rigid forks on your bike, great. But there is really no performance benefit unless you're 300 pounds or riding a tandem or something. Suspension forks need this kind of axle because they are inherently not very stiff structures (2 pistons joined only by the crown and the arch) and adding a very stiff axle at the bottom of the fork is enormously helpful. Rigid forks do not suffer from torsional or lateral stiffness problems, so a big axle is pretty meaningless.
With that said, I'm happy to build you a fork with these dropouts either way. The 15mm axle isn't going to hurt anything, so worst case scenario, you're still good and you spent $50 on a big axle.
6 comments:
No comment on the rant.
Yeah, no comment because you weigh at least 300 pounds!
I know, I know, you are a big fan of the rigid/TA setup. As they say in Road House... opinions vary.
Heh.
I am on the same side of the fence on thru-axle rigid forks, but what say you to those that claim one of the benefits being consistent alignment with the rotor/caliper every time you install the wheel? Not that I have that issue often myself with my QR rigid froks.
Those aluminum spacers appear to be loose? Now you have to keep track of them when taking the wheel on/off. It would have been nice if the they were captured with a c-clip or something. I thought I would like this style dropout for rigid but its tough to beat qr simplicity.
Yes, the spacer is loose (it's just one spacer, I don't know why it has the grooves machined in). Not super hard to keep track of IMO and a dab of loctite would keep it on there just fine too.
If you have the thru axle, you can also have the Adaptrac system with on-the-fly tire pressure adjustments. This is what XC racers wanted back in the 1980s, not suspension forks.
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