25 Safety Moment : The Curious Case Of a Coat Hanger

I received an email last month from a person about a bizarre incident he had on the road. And I believe this could constitute a legit safety moment for February, although I felt like something like this has a low probability of occurring.

Fellow blogger Ole Eichorn, from Westlake Village, California (also a software specialist and CTO for Aperio) wrote to me the following :


"I have a Kestrel 200 EMS which I have been riding for the past nine years, logging some 40,000 miles on it. Anyway, so I'm cruising around 20mph the other day and I run over a coat hanger! I hear it banging around in my back wheel and suddenly the back wheel stops spinning. I fishtail to a stop, look down, and see that my rear derailleur has torn off the back of the bike, and is now dangling from the chain just behind my bottom bracket. Closer inspection reveals the coat hanger wrapped around my back axle, inside the chain, and also intertwined with the chain and the derailleur. What a weird thing, I could run over that same coat hanger 1,000 times and not have anything happen.


Once I got home, it took me 45 minutes to cut the coat hanger free and assess the damage. The really bad thing is that the dropout to which the derailleur attaches is mangled. The dropout is bonded into the frame, and I'm afraid the frame itself will have to be repaired to replace it. That means carbon fiber work. The rest of the rig seems to have survived; the wheel is undamaged, the cassette looks okay, and the chain looks okay (although it was tweaked rather severely and I'll probably replace it when I replace the derailleur).

My question is whether you think this can be repaired, and whether the bike will ever be the same again? I’d hate to have to buy a new bike just because of an errant coat hanger."


I felt pretty dogon sorry that a coat hanger took his bike out. Personally, I feel integrated derailleur hangers are such a bad feature in bicycle design. Once you accidentally destroy them in an incident, the whole frame is now a waste, assuming it cannot be repaired. And there goes couple of thousand dollars in water.

My swift response to him was about Calfee's carbon fiber repair program. I asked Ole to send an inquiry to them and see if they could help him. The following was his response :


"I did contact Calfee but they suggested I buy a new frame; apparently without having access to a replacement Kestrel dropout they wouldn’t be able to do anything. (They could do the carbon work on the frame.) The problem is that while there are still Kestrel bikes in the market, they really don’t have anything to do with the old Kestrel company which was bought a few years ago and folded into Fuji. So old parts and frames are no longer available.

I found a company called RR Velo which has a machine shop and builds custom carbon frames, and they said they’re able to do the repair. So I took the bike to my local shop, had them strip all the parts off the frame, and it is on its way to RR Velo. We’ll see how it all works out. I would sure love to be able to keep riding this bike, I’ve put about 40,000 miles on it these last nine years. A new bike would be great, but I don’t have a spare $6,000 lying around."


As bizarre as it sounds, this could happen to you. I think the key would be to watch out for items strewn on the road ahead of time and try and avoid them totally. You can bunny hop or maneuver around them. Its hard to be 100% confident that an impact with a small item such as a coat hanger would not have an adverse effect on your bike. If you can't avoid them, it doesn't take much to warn other riders behind you (if there are) and slow the bike down. In Ole's case, he wasn't able to do that and he lost his beloved bike in the process. What a bummer!

To put an interesting end to this post, I recall an incident similar to this that happened towards the finish of the spectacular and now classic 1988 Paris Roubaix. To every great performance in a bicycle race can be attributed strength, fitness, power and skill...but you simply cannot discount another deciding factor - SHEER RANDOM LUCK!

After 164 miles of dusty and bone jarring cobblestones, one of the two riders in the lead breakaway of two - Swiss cyclist Thomas Wegmuller - caught a piece of plastic bag on the road which eventually sucked up and entangled with his rear derailleur! What happens later brings one of the most crashing twists ever to the race in the history of the Paris Roubaix.

To see that section of the action, scroll the time bar to 6:16 min in the following video. Video courtesy goes out to the brilliant Socalrider909.





So, has anything like this ever happened to you? Would you mind sharing with us that experience?

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