Originally Posted by 3alarmer

...here is a bicycle I repaired with the same sort of frame head tube damage using the method described above. It rides fine, although the original geometry was a little bit idiosyncratic to begin with, having both a short top tube and a relatively slack head tube angle. If yours rides OK in your experience, I woiuldn't go to the trouble of stripping the frame and cold bending it. What you have now is a bike with a steeper head tube angle than the original, and a slightly shorter wheelbase, so it probably turns and rides a little "quicker". A lot of later frames than that one were intentionally made with quicker steering.

Anyway, here's at least one example of a repair of that sort of damage by cold bending. It has not been repainted, even though you can see some cracking where the tubing was bulged.

Yes, it will probably eventually fail somewhere at the point where the tubing walls got bent and then straightened. Such failures in steel tubing frames rarely occur without warning with some prior crack that eventually propagates in a line around the tubing. I only salvaged this one because it is a Frejus, and I don't race it or otherwise ride it hard. It's just a nice older bike that I wanted to preserve in some fashion, but a true repair with new frame tubes would cost way more investment in time and money than it is worth to me as a bike. There are many other bikes that have not been crashed.