I’ve heard that carbon forks can hide damage to them. I’ve looked at the fork after the crash, and I can’t see any damage to it, however… My road bike was set up for tri’s (I didn’t have a tri bike at the time), as such, to drop the handlebars it had a few spacers (two, maybe three, roughly 1cm) on top of the stem. This keeps the inside of the steertube cap from reaching the down past the stem (eg there was a hollow/unsupported spot in the steertube, I’m not explaining this very well).
The crash occured on a rough downhill stretch, front tire blew and bike jackknifed at 40mph and I went over the handlebars, the only visible damage to the bike was scuffing the outer rim of the front wheel, and some cosmetic damage to the front shifter/brake casing. More complete description of the crash is in one of my posts from a few days after: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?post=1943366;search_string=alaric83%20crash;#1943366
Anyway, I haven’t ridden the bike since the crash (trainer aside). As road season is coming up, I pulled the fork out and looked at it again, can’t see anything wrong with it, but again I’m not sure how visible the damage would be.
I would not ride it. Others here would. Nobody (even the mechanic at your local bike shop) will be able to tell you that the fork is as strong as new without doing funky structural scans.
Do you trust the fork enough to risk your skin going downhill 40mph, or would you rather shell out another $150 for a new fork as insurance? That’s your own decision.
I’d probably sell it on ebay with a truthful disclaimer/warning, the switch will likely cost you $50 bucks or so.
Failure modes for carbon fiber are usually sudden and catastrophic, so after I had my car / bike accident at IMC a few years ago I knew from previous painful experience that the potential injury to me if the fork failed was simply too great to risk. 23 years ago I had a different bike accident involving a bad fork that pitched me over the handlebars and I went face-first into the collection of glass, gravel, sand, and other debris on the shoulder of the road. It took several hours of picking debris out of my face and a plastic surgeon to put the left side of my face back together; I still have some scrambled nerves from that one. In comparison, forks are cheap and easy to replace.