Originally Posted by
531phile
But this is the thing though. Who is going to risk their life riding a 30 year old carbon fiber framed bike? There maybe collectors, but it will be posted to a wall instead of riding. This is what I'm trying to say. C&V folks collect AND ride their steel/aluminum bikes, but I don't think they will do this with vintage carbon and since the majority of highend bikes now are made of carbon, I don't think there will be as big of C&V crowd as there is now.
I think you might have a slight misunderstanding of carbon. It's a material with a pretty high tolerance for the types of stress induced by normal bicycling. It's throwing it into a car or against a pole that causes it to fail. The frames are built with a certain amount of deflection designed into the bike. That is, deflections under normal riding conditions. These deflections occur in the elastic region and do not "wear out" the frame.
I think a part of this idea that carbon "wears out" is the comparative differences between a 10 year old carbon bike and a brand new one. The 10 year old bike isn't any different from when it was built 10 years ago. Newer carbon frames are just that much better.
All that to say that there is no reason the carbon bike currently hanging on my wall won't last until a major collision or fall induces an abnormal stress to the frame and breaks it.
EDIT: Not to mention, a lot of the carbon failures in racing happen because of a part that is built pretty much on the edge of these aforementioned stresses. Add that to being ridden by guys who could tear phone books in half if you threw it into their chains, and you have a recipe for destroying carbon parts. I'm sure this is no different from failures of other lightweight metal parts built for racing. Hincapie's busted aluminum steerer on the Paris Roubaix race comes to mind.