Technical information

Thank you for purchasing Ritchey! We appreciate your support and thus, every effort has been made to offer you high quality, superior design, top-notch workmanship and quality control on all of our products.

To ensure correct installation and performance, we recommend your parts be installed by a professional bicycle technician. If you plan to install your new Ritchey products yourself, please read carefully the information below before proceeding.

Ritchey assumes no responsibility for malfunction or injury caused by faulty installation or maintenance. Be aware that bolts can rattle loose and parts be damaged after a crash. All parts must be frequently checked and serviced to ensure optimum performance and most importantly, safety. We strongly recommend the replacement of all Ritchey Carbon and WCS components after every major crash. Due to the structure of these lightweight products, damage may not be visible. However failure can result due to further stresses on impact affected areas.

All Ritchey products are tested to exceed CEN standards (EN 14766 and EN 14781) safety requirements. These tests are performed on our unique testing machines located directly inside the Ritchey Asia product development department. This location gives Ritchey development staff immediate access to all in-house testing equipment during the business day, which allows us to improve the ability to regularly monitor all testing activity and make any adjustment as needed. Prototypes as well as production samples are fatigue tested 24 hours per day to maintain the highest level of safety. This is done not only for our pre-production prototype products but also to help maintain consistently high quality in all products during normal production.

In-house Impact testing is conducted on all Ritchey forks to exceed the EN safety requirements for impact resistance. This means that a 22.5Kg weight is dropped onto the fork dropouts from various heights simulating a frontal impact. Ritchey forks are regularly tested and tuned during the development process to ensure that in the unfortunate event of a frontal impact, the likelihood of a catastrophic failure is minimized. We consider this to be one of the most crucial tests conducted at our testing facility.

Although it is not an EN Safety required test, we do also subject both road and mountain handlebars to severe drop testing. Large weights are affixed to the ends of the handlebar, or in the drops in the case of a road bar, and the bar is dropped from various heights onto a solid striker, bringing the bar to an immediate stop and forcing the bar to absorb and dissipate the impact energy. The ability of the handlebar to effectively absorb and dissipate this energy is a key attribute that is used to develop some of the safest handlebars currently available.