Berg417448

They better not let their families fly on planes made from aluminum parts either considering the large number of failures of aluminum airplane parts through the years.

02Giant 

Get over yourself...

corrado33

Interesting. I'd like to read up on that if you have any good sources? (I'm being honest, not trying to be a dick or anything.) Actually, any bike history book in general would be great. Any suggestions? (Again, this may come off as me trying to say "you don't have any sources dumbass" but in reality I just want a good bike book to read!)

I read the "History of Schwinn" articles part one and two a while back. Tons of pages of that. Cool stuff. Unfortunately that really ended right before the CF era even got started.

thin_concrete

Crap! I just threw my 2013 Dogma 60.1 in the dumpster since it's too old!

CliffordK

Some generic Chinese saddle.

I posted a link to my notes earlier, but here it is again. More notes on pre-crack impressions earlier in the thread.
https://www.bikeforums.net/18888639-post27.html

Not bondo, but it appears to be just a glob of epoxy.

I may attempt a repair sometime with epoxy and some reinforcement.

Cyclist0108

That's interesting. I cracked my 1987 Bianchi's frame at the FD braze-on point. They did replace it, but it took more than a year.

Wilfred Laurier

I can't think of any reading material. But I know, and so do you, that steel bikes have been made for over 100 years, with special light-weigh ones available for racers for most of that time. Aside from a couple of dead-end projects in the 50s, aluminum bikes didn't get started until the 70s, so the theory that frame failures were the result of immature manufacturing techniques holds better for aluminum than for steel.

Something you should read, though, is a materials text that explains 'fatigue limit'. Steel has a 'fatigue limit' - an amount of stress in the material that can theoretically be repeated infinitely without failure, and taken out of context this leads to erroneous statements like 'steel bikes last forever'. The missing bit of info is that just because steel has a fatigue limit, doesn't mean that a particular part (like a frame) is built or used in such a way that it will not exceed that limit.

Edit: regarding the history of Schwinn, as iconic and interesting as the brand and its history are, they have never been an example of high-quality or advanced bike manufacturing, unless you count their contribution to the practice of outsourcing manufacturing to Taiwan, of which they were pioneers.

1 old fart

Mfg Warranty period is limit on carbon.

corrado33

Thanks! Will do. Materials engineering texts are usually very... dense, but I will try.

Interesting. CF seems to emulate the fatigue limit that ferrous alloys have, until they fail, with very little warning. According to this paper I found. I will try to find more.
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...cle-composites



EDIT: I can't find any more papers that have this same sort of behavior. Half the publications I've seen show behavior similar to a non ferrous alloy (get weaker over time until they fail), the other half show CF as having a fatigue limit of 90% of their original strength. I'm not sure what to conclude.

Cyclist0108

Helpful tip: Especially when you clean them with WD40 and Acetone.

Mountain Mitch

My thoughts exactly!
There must be hundreds of thousands cf bikes over two years of age on the roads and trails. If this was a 'thing' surely there'd be considerably more publicity about it: class action lawsuits, articles in every bike magazine etc. Sounds to me like you got the old coverup for a defective product!

Maelochs

The legal position taken by the manufacturer is exactly what you'd expect: "We take no responsibility for anything,.. if it broke, you used it wrong. Sorry for your problems. You lose."

I am with joejack951 and Mountain Mitch---if they have too many old carbon frames sent to them, I will gladly handle some of the overload.

berner

I'm never getting on another airplane. Gonna rely on my trusty aluminum bike. I mean, if alum. is good enough to wrap my sandwiches in foil, it is good enough for my bike. I've never, in over half a century, had a sandwich failure.

ltxi

This all be quite funny

AlmostTrick

and...

So even rigorous inspection can't save a CF rider from possible catastrophic failure.

"Fault" or "Warranty" means nothing to me if I'm dead or badly injured. Thanks for posting this OP.

rydabent

So far Boeing has not had structural failure like the French Air Bus planes have had. Hopefully they dont.

BTW on the Air Bus that crashed off Long Island, Air Bus blamed the pilot for using too much rudder. But it is a computer flown airplane, and the pilot can only use as much rudder as the computer will let him. However I learned to fly in a Cessna 150 which is very light aluminium. In cross wind landings even on that light tin can plane, I could slam the rudder clear to the stop, and the tail didnt fall off like the Air Bus.

Machka 

Send them to me!! I'll take care of them for you!!

jefnvk

Yes, because a Cessna 150 is subject to anywhere near the forces that an Airbus 300 is...

And no, it was not a fly by wire system. It was a conventional system. The forces were not due to too much rudder, it was due to excessive oscillating overcorrection, essentially slamming the rudder back and forth full lock to full lock. The NTSB came to the same conclusion as Airbus, as did the Airline Pilots Association, even if they amounted the rudder input system to a design flaw. The outcome of the investigation was not that the tail fin itself was faulty, rather that there were lapses in AA's pilot training on how to correctly use rudders at high speeds.

DaveWC

It seems that you are purposely misstating what was said to you. The statement that pros ride carbon bikes for 2 years & then get rid of them is not a statement regarding the useful life of a carbon bike. It is a description of behavior and you are drawing a conclusion based on your preconceived idea & using it to prove what you already believe. I could similarly say that pro teams need to be on leading edge equipment and use that statement as proof of my point.

I suggest that every product you own will break down at some point & using your logic, you should determine the useful life of that product (and all products like it) solely based on your experience with that one product. It's a ridiculous notion.

bakes1

I truly feel sorry for all the cf addicts who cannot even admit that cf, as used in a bike frame, is overall more vulnerable than steel.
Whether or not that additional amount of vulnerability is a real world factor is another issue.
I personally would gladly ride a cf frame over the roughest roads for 20 years if it suited my needs.
I happen to have originally purchased aluminum for cost purposes and then switched to steel after testing most popular materials. I just like the ride of steel the best and admit that part of it is nostalgia.

Maelochs

Lots of folks have said it in this and the other hysterical thread. I will say it one more time:

Put your postage where you mouths are and send me your CF bikes---even frames only. Anyone who really believes that a two-year-old CF frame is a potentially fatal accident about to happen .... Act on it.

Otherwise this is just more Internet drivel.

GamblerGORD53

Well it took me all of 5 seconds to figure out why it broke.... ANTIQUE design, not age.
That bike has silly round tubes the same as steel bikes. WTH were they thinking ???
Never the less, I won't be buying any CF bike.

rydabent

Wrong on both counts. Full rudder application is proportional on both planes.
Second the smoke screen BS to gloss over the failure of the CF vertical stab is just that BS!!! Blame the pilot was the easy way out. If a plane is so poorly designed it cant stand full rudder deflection of the the rudder it is under designed. BTW probably money was exchanged under the table to blame the pilots.

My whole point here is in bikes or planes CF is NOT the wonder material mfg would have you believe.

Also FYI my choice of bike frame material is titanium.

Wheever

You know, if the manufacturers "knew" that CF bikes were dangerous and going to asplode spontaneously in some known time frame, I don't think they would sell CF bikes. Why? LIABILITY AND CLASS-ACTION LAWSUITS. Can you imagine? The companies--all of them--would be annihilated by the money needed to pay of the damages. Look at VW and the diesel scandal. BILLIONS. A series of "death from asplosion" lawsuits would be orders of magnitude greater.

So, basically, what I'm saying is I don't believe any of this crap about "2-year lifespan." Just don't ride your CF bike after it's fallen off the rack on the back of your car without getting it inspected. Or, hell, don't ride it at all and get a new frame for it. CF is fragile when it comes to impacts, and will suffer damage that isn't obvious and/or visible at all. We all know that. But It's not made of eggshells and bird wings, either.

jefnvk

Well, without the engineering data (which I doubt either of us actually have), it is rather hard to say proportionally which endures more stress. That said, I still maintain a 2 seat Cessna flying around at a bit over 100 knots is still far less likely to encounter anywhere near even the proportional stresses that a 275 or so seat A300 pushing over 500 would see. The point is rather moot, though, the planes are completely different designs aerodynamically and mechanically, meaning the loads on their rudders is far different, and at the end of the day the A300 was being operated outside of how it should have been by a pilot who should have known better.

Even thought the evidence above states that a CF road bike should only be used on decently maintained paved roads, there is nothing stopping me from taking it out on dirt two tracks. That is not a design flaw, just as it is not a design flaw that you can input greater than allowed input to rudders at high speeds. Heck, CFIT is still a major problem, do you consider it a design flaw they don't stop you from doing that?

As to the rest, your claiming of a conspiracy is silly. You are on just as much of a mission to discredit CF, regardless of the facts staring you in the face, that for decades the planes have flown safely when used in the designed manner.

If I want to make this simple, though, I'll point out the fact that at least three 737s that I can think of have had metal fatigue that resulted in fuselage blowouts.