...when they start to look like this. Very corroded, the dropouts were so worn it couldn't hold my front wheel straight and they looked like they could bust off at any moment.

You can see one dropout [right] was much more worn out than the other one, hence the wheel sitting askew. It's amazing the right dropout held the axle at all, there's very little for the skewer to clamp on to. You can also see in the first picture small holes were being formed in the fork leg from all the corrosion!

For comparison, here's a view of the dropouts from my new forks.

Here's my new forks! I took the stickers off, it makes them less desirable to thieves.

Here's my old forks next to my new ones. You can see the new ones are quite a bit longer than the old ones. Something I didn't realize when I first got them.


And here's what it looks like after I finally got it installed! I had to pick up a new headset today as well, as the old one was pretty thrashed. You can see the longer forks have changed the geometry of my bike quite a bit. It felt funny when I took it for a test ride, it tracks differently on corners. I'll get used to it eventually, I guess.