Chino, I don't know why my post appears as facetious to you. I fully believe what I wrote. It may be nearly univerally believed that the master is the weakest link, but I don't know if the master link is the weakest link or not. Considering that the load on the pins primarily shear (not tensile) I'm comfortable taking the difference in swage method out of the equation. The use of clip-style masters would validate this thought. So then the question becomes why would the pins on the master have less shear strength than any other link?
I've seen my buddy's turbo bike damage an EK chain at the strip. It stretched several consecutive links. I do not know the cause, whether it was related to impact loading (spin and hit) or the chain was too tight, too loose, etc, but I don't think we would say that 6 or 7 links were weaker than the rest and they happened to be all in a row. I believe their location at the exact moment damage occurred determined which ones got damaged. Additionally, I would be willing to bet if we took 150 links and shear tested all the pins the variation in shear results would be masked by the measurement error. In summary, I'm not sure we can identify the weakest link and I'm not sure the weakest link will be the one to break.
I have another buddy with a 380+ hp bike that has had two masters for a couple years now with no issues, and he's a big guy. I've seen a clip-style master come off, but maybe it wasn't assembled correctly. The point of my previous post was that two masters on one chain would pose the same risk of master failure as one master on two bikes if all three bikes had the same usage. Given that I don't see properly assembled masters failing in the single-master applications I'm not at all worried about doubling my exposure to that risk.
