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Lambert of England

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I spoke to a guy at a local bike show who road a Viscount for 20 years with the original death fork and never had a problem with it. So I wonder if the issue with the fork was blown out of proportion. The same goes for the old aluminum tubed steel lugged frames example being the Raleigh Tecnhnium frames you 1 read horror story of the tubes coming apart due to cheap epoxy then everyone goes off on them how they are crap. I often wonder how many forks had to fail for them to do a recall on them.
 
I spoke to a guy at a local bike show who road a Viscount for 20 years with the original death fork and never had a problem with it. So I wonder if the issue with the fork was blown out of proportion. The same goes for the old aluminum tubed steel lugged frames example being the Raleigh Tecnhnium frames you 1 read horror story of the tubes coming apart due to cheap epoxy then everyone goes off on them how they are crap. I often wonder how many forks had to fail for them to do a recall on them.

The memo with the diagram of the difference in fork construction published by Yamaha states that failure was a result of the bike running into something, bumper cars with the bike. I don't think there was ever just a spontaneous failure of the fork from normal use.


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I have a lady friend who owned one of the Lamberts in the 1970s. She was a very good rider and good enough to ride with the boys in our group rides. Her fork literally just came apart while riding and she still has some scars from the fork failure to this day. She was less than 120 pounds in weight and a skilled rider. Spent about 4 months in recovery from the incident. Roger
 
I understand it was only the first 2 versions some of which did fail and the 3rd & final version did not. I wonder if all the failures were on Lamberts, being the earlier brand, or also on Viscounts. I think on the english forum there are occasionally ex-employees who have interesting stories, and might know that.
 
I have a Viscount with a death fork. Here it is.

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as a metallurgist and professional forensic engineer, I can only say one thing about the Lambert cast aluminum fork - what the hell were they thinking.
A cast 17-4PH landing gear strut shut down Fairchild Aircraft, but that is a Much stronger and Much more homogeneous cast alloy.
 
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The BB is unique to the bike. and the spindle and cranks are square cut not tapered and can loosen.
 
At the old Bicycle Peddler at 38th and Georgetown Rd where I worked in Indianapolis the summers of '73 and '74 I recall we got one or two of these in- It was a "Lambert" and they had just changed the name to "Viscount", or was it the other way around. Anyway, there was nothing said about the forks back then. I thought the crank was novel, and the bikes were quite light for the price.

Has NO ONE said "matress" to Mr. Lambert yet?
 
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