Originally Posted by
Hiro11
Eh, maybe. My running coach still rides around on a 1989 Trek 2500 (alloy lugs, bonded carbon tubes) and it's fine. I have easily 10K miles on my 2005 Madone and it's structurally just fine. Steel can last basically forever, but there's a lot of heavily used carbon out there at this point...
Mine blew up at about the 20-30k mile mark, so it might be just a matter of time. One thing unique to carbon is the number of glue bonds in the frame. A welded or brazed frame is basically a monolithic structure. A carbon frame is a bunch of pieces glued together. After this, anytime I see metals bonded to composites in a frame (something stiff -metal- bonded to something soft -carbon composite-), I will be skeptical about its ultimate longevity.
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Cat 2 Track, Cat 3 Road.
"If you’re new enough [to racing] that you would ask such question, then i would hazard a guess that if you just made up a workout that sounded hard to do, and did it, you’d probably get faster." --
the tiniest sprinter