Nitron Racing Systems
Firstly I would like to introduce myself as the ?Mark? mentioned in this thread from Nitron. Hello!
I would also like to thank one of your members for alerting me to the discussion that has arisen on this forum.
Despite some of the comments, I would like to put anyone who has a Nitron shock at ease. These shocks are built and tested to very high standards that are not representative of their price. Nitron work to extremely low margins. We are engineers that are genuine motorsport enthusiasts, we ride ourselves and appreciate the importance our product plays in transforming fellow riders machines. We obviously understand the absolute importance of safety and quality.
It?s nice to read from many of you how well the shock has performed. I have been told that some posts have been made from commentators that may have a commercial agenda and personal financial interest in remarking on another British manufacturer. We are not in the position where we have to put down other manufacturers products and infact encourage competition, as it makes everyone work harder to produce a better product for us all. Therefore, I would like to keep this post technical and allow everyone to decide on where to spend their money.
As for the reason this has happened, I would like to outline some of the notes from the technical report. I need to be clear that this is the first case of this incident occurring we are aware of and it is not a design fault.
Nitron shocks are all hand build to allow us to match valving and spring rates to each rider, giving a bespoke product. As such none of the components used are welded or press-fitted into place, instead we use solidly machined (from billet alloy) components that screw together allowing for total rebuilds to carried out.
In this instance, the lower gland (the part that has come slightly unscrewed in the photos) has turned a few threads. With the high pressure gas and the large amount of force that is experienced in the shock, the seals have ?walked? out. This then results in a loss of oil shown in the photos.
Now, as for why this has happened? harmonics, vibrations and extreme force can cause threads to unwind if they are not torqued correctly. We have had one other experience with this occurring, on a BMW car where a similar set of forces and vibrations caused a thread to unwind. This was many years ago. Since this happened, our torque settings have be re-engineered and we have not experienced this problem again. However, as these shocks are hand build, an element of human error, spread across thousands of shocks has resulted in this shock not receiving the appropriate torque and after so many miles it has resulted in this failure. Each shock takes days to build once the parts have been machined and I thank many of you for recognising the quality of the product and the longevity of the finish.
As to the motion ratios and force velocity curves that the Bird places on the shocks; it is true that is no greater than that placed on other shocks that we build. However, in this case a certain frequency has been sustained over many miles. As a side note, we build shocks for MotoX, Quadbikes and Paris-Dakar offroad vehicles that suffer far more grief in 1 day that most road bikes will go through in a lifetime. We hold numerous lap records and supply shocks for some of the world?s best race teams and supply large OE Japanese manufacturers.
I hope this helps answer some of the questions you guys have.
I would welcome anyone who has an issue to contact me. I am aware of several posts mentioning other failures of the shock but I do not have any records of this being bought to our attention. Hopefully from our response to this individual failure everyone can see how much we value our customers and how hard we will work to get them back on the road safely; no matter how well used or old the shock is ?we can standby our engineering and design.
Ride safe. @tu*
Mark (mark.tapscott@nitron.co.uk)
for this time of day
