I am not partial to carbon fiber forks or bikes, not because of it failing (at least not right away), but because I tend to keep my bikes for long periods of time and carbon had a definite shelf life. There a re exceptions, but overall I would not feel safe riding the average 15 year old carbon fiber bike. Now, that said there are literally, millions of carbon fiber bikes out there and increasingly it is the material of choice for forks! Just about any frame builders web site will feature at least one & generally you have to do a little digging (& drop a ton of money) if you want something besides carbon fiber! So playing devils advocate here, can they really be so bad? I personally know a dozen people with carbon fiber frames, they ride frequently and have for many years & I haven't heard one horror story of anything breaking! Back in the day I knew people with Kestrals & occasionally they had issues, but rarely catastrophic failures! Now those and other early CF bikes were generally massively overbuilt. I think the industry, using that as a starting point started lightening and refining, in the process I assume they went too far and things got too fragile!? Now it seems as if they have found the middle ground, they know where to add heft and strength and they have a fair idea where they can cheat & save weight. Overall it appears the current crop of CF forks are indeed quite robust! Still, how viable are these frames/forks going to be in 20 years!? Time will tell, but I'll keep with my steel (and maybe titanium) Important to note that 30 years ago people maligned aluminum as a frame material, saying it was too soft and it would fail, but the heat treated aluminum frames have proven themselves, very few actually did fail. 10 years from now maybe we'll be laughing this off!?
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