To say that Nicolai is hard on crutches would be an understatement. This evening one of his six month old, state of the art crutches failed catastrophically. The aluminum tubing just above the grip support weld snapped off. Fortunately Nico was not injured but did miss his soccer game for lack of a back up. Nico was a field tester for SideStix, the manufacturer of the crutch, and they have been really great to work with. I have little doubt they will replace the failed crutch and study the one we return to improve the design and/or manufacturing process. Nico has a set of titanium crutches he will fall back on but he finds it very difficult to switch between dissimilar crutch designs and prefers the more comfortable SideStix.