News 41 Thermal

To celebrate 20 years of 41-Thermal, Odyssey and Sunday have teamed up to offer this special limited edition Glow In The Dark kit (parts sold separately). VERY limited quantities are available now through shops worldwide and direct through our online store.

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What is 41-Thermal?

Our 41-Thermal process has revolutionized the manufacturing of chromoly BMX forks, bars, cranks and frames. We pioneered it, developed it and continue to perfect it. Our lab and ride testing is methodical – constantly striving to make the process better through continuous experimentation and true engineering.

All 41-Thermal products are lab tested, team proven, and backed by an unmatched and legendary lifetime warranty.

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20 Years of 41-Thermal

As part of our mission to make the best BMX forks possible, we continue to refine the 41-Thermal® process at all stages of manufacturing. Each step in the process is held under strict scrutiny, and we continue to examine the strength and fatigue testing methods used to evaluate our designs.

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Stampy Test Goes Above and Beyond the Industry Standard

• Much higher load than industry standard EN tests
• Load is applied in the correct direction
• Proper mounting rig to replicate real world use
• Test doesn’t stop until the fork fails

In the previous round of Stampy fork tests we blew the industry standard EN tests for bicycle forks out of the water, and yet we still couldn’t break our own fork. In fact, we had to give up after running the fork for 2,000,000 cycles and with the machine operating at its ultimate limit.

So, in order to push the tests and our forks even harder we created an updated rig design that would let us supply much more force than the last time around. With this test we doubled up the cylinders that are applying the load and ramped the force up by 25%, going from 4000 Newtons to 5000 Newtons. That’s just over half a ton! (1124 lbf per cycle). Even so, at half a million cycles we started to wonder how long our forks were going to last, and since our competitor’s forks had already been taken to failure, we decided to ramp up the load on our forks to 6000 Newtons (1349 lbf), 50% higher than the previous tests, and after over 650,000 cycles, we were finally able to break them.

It is important to note that the 41-Thermal forks not only outperformed every other model that we tested by a huge margin, but that they did so while being lighter than most of the other forks too. This is direct evidence that proper design, engineering and manufacturing are much more important factors than simply always making the part heavier in hopes of making it stronger.

Unmatched and Legendary Lifetime Warranty

• Best in class replacement program
• Warranty against bending, cracking, and breaking
• No fine print to limit coverage to basic manufacturing defects

When you see how hard we push to make the best forks; to make them better and better every chance we get, it is easy to understand why our legendary lifetime warranty against bending and breaking is still around 20 years after we first introduced it. And when you see the contrast between our forks and our competitors you can also quickly see why most of their warranties have long since been quietly canceled or modified with complicated terms and conditions that usually limit the warranty to manufacturing defects alone.

Feel free to contact us at stampy@odysseybmx.com with any questions you may have.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of our tried and true 41-Thermal Heat Treatment process! Thank you all for continuing to support these products over the years.

41-Thermal is the 4130 chromoly manufacturing process that starts at the design stage, carries on throughout manufacturing, and is only completed when we reach the finishing steps. There are an endless amount of variables to fine tune, and every action along the way counts and matters.

We introduced 41-Thermal in 1999, and the process continues to evolve and change along with the products which proudly carry this famously trademarked name. Other companies have attempted to write the process off as a “gimmick” or they’ll say, “it’s just heat-treating.” The truth however is that nothing has revolutionized the manufacturing of chromoly BMX forks, bars, cranks and frames like 41-Thermal has.

We pioneered it, developed it and continue to perfect it, never at the mercy of feebly asking manufacturers to do “whatever that other company is doing.” Our lab and ride testing is methodical – constantly striving to make the process better through continuous experimentation and true engineering.

41-Thermal products are backed by years of research and development, and they have always been fully supported by a lifetime warranty.

Lab tested. Team Proven.

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Head over to The Merged for an interview with Chris Cotsonas (product design manager) regarding the origins of our 41 Thermal process.

Hit up Dig BMX for a great write up on our legendary 41 Thermal forks. We’ve been refining this heat treating process for over a decade now and utilize it on all our forks, bars and cranks. It’s so good that ALL of our 41 Thermal products come with a lifetime warranty.

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This is our latest advert commemorating 41 Thermal’s 10 Year Anniversary. For this one, Jim Bauer dug deep into the photo archive and put together one hell of a Photoshop file. Many software crashes later and you get an Odyssey ad that’s filled to its edges with history. If you want to get a good look at all of them, open up the 1920×1200 wallpaper or pick up Ride BMX’s 157th issue.

Also, in other Jim Bauer news, he is now a member of iPath’s BMX team!

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You may have noticed the post-it note on our main page or maybe even caught the first cut of the animation on our Flickr account. What’s it all about? Well, it’s been 10 years since we introduced the revolutionary 41 Thermal process and it’s our little internet way of paying tribute to the tried and true recipe.

The post-it is embedable so feel free to post-it up in your internet estate.
Just click the little icon on the upper right hand corner.

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The Elementary Stem – Winner of an International Design Magazine award

RideBMX.com has an article up where they asked a handful of pros what parts they think has the best designs. There’s a lot of Odyssey products mentioned and our own Ben Ward gives you the scoop on our trademarked 41 Thermal process.