Hangdogger,
I’m very sorry to hear that you had a bad customer service experience with us, especially as we really strive to have the best customer service staff in the business, I know that this year we were very strained with the hiring on of 4 new CS staff as well as a moving facilities, as we try to keep up with business demands, all while striving to never put any customer into an automated phone system, the goal is to have a live person answer every call. We have also put in new computer systems this year which by first of next year will be able to tie the entire building together so that CS can see what shipping is doing and has direct access to engineering and production and so on, currently the system relies on people walking across the building or paging somebody else to solve some of these problems, and we finally realized that to have top notch customer service we needed to spend some big money, so we are doing that right now. But of course, that is not an excuse, and certainly none of that makes your situation any better.
If it will make you feel any better, pleae PM me your RA number or full name/address and I can have engineering do an autopsy on your rim, provided that this happened recently and the bad rim has not been destroyed already (all warranty and crash replacement parts are destroyed as we have caught people in our dumpsters trying to salvage product, and even seen dumpster parts show up on ebay). To answer your question about how we know what happened to the rim, there is a plasticizing agent in the epoxy which adds to the toughness, and when the plastic is strained past a certain percentage the molecular structure becomes aligned in the stressed area creating a pattern which is visible under magnification, and with larger energy impacts is visible to the naked eye. This is a similar effect to when you bend a piece of plastic and it turns white at the area of the bend, it looks like that, and hitting things of different shapes results in different patterns around the failure. Based on the shape and pattern of the stress it is usually obvious if there was an impact. There are also dozens of production errors that can cause a rim to crack, and we have a book of photos and descriptions of what is what and how to diagnose. If a rim shows up which doesn’t fit any known criteria, it is sent to engineering to make a determination, and in those cases we usually end up calling the customer to get the story as well as fully disecting the rim and doing various analyses to try and determine if there is any material defect or contamination or other manufacture caused problems, generally in these instances the customer has the wheel covered under warranty as the dissection can take 4-6 weeks as it involves outsourced chemical analysis and so on.
The thing I would tell people about broken carbon rims is that the rim is almost never broken any time near when the crack is discovered. Under magnification I have studied dozens of rim cracks in the brake zone and in every instance found that the carbon around the crack has been sanded down by the brake pads. What has happened is that the rim was cracked in some impact, but appears fine as the damage is just at the rim edge, then as the wheel continues to be ridden for weeks or months the crack grows due to abnormally high stresses caused by the crack (basically the broken fibers cause adjacent fibers to take up their load, every time that zone sees high stress a couple more fibers crack due to the abnormally high stress, putting even higher stress on their adjacent fibers and so on in a snowball effect), during this time the brake pads act as a sand paper on the crack edges everytime the brakes are used the material at the crack edges is ground away. Ultimately the crack is discovered and the riders first thought is that they haven’t hit anything recently, and hence almost every damaged rim we see comes with an attached story of never having hit or impacted anything. I’m sure that our CS guy was not meaning to insinuate that you were lying (and I’m going to talk to all of thim about this to ensure it is handled better in the future) but probably thinking that this was an old impact recently discovered.
Again, I’m very sorry for your negative experience and for the way your problem was handled, we all try extremely hard to do the right thing and do what is right by our customers, dealers and ourselves, so it is very frustrating and upsetting to all of us when we cannot.
Regards
josh