At the Clay meeting last weekend, a competitor in one of the 100cc classes noted that he had hairline cracks in his axle, so he changed it.
Missed a heat doing it, but that's surely better than having the accident, so all credit to him.
It highlights the fact that axles do and will crack and one has to keep an eye on them, particularly if one has kept it for some time, had a crash or collision or regularly jump the kerbs.
The aviation groups are very aware of the problem. There's a recent example of a gudgeon pin cracking. The crack started from a corrosion pit 0.04 mm deep and shows beach marks where successive stresses (engine starts?) progressively widened the crack till the pin suddenly gave way.
Just as a thought, 0.04mm is 40 microns, a human hair is 100 microns, so if you are in the habit of cleaning the rust off your axle with emery paper and don't polish out the scratches, you may be weakening your axle more than you think.
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