An acquaintance of my sister has a bike that I looked at for him. He had an incident and it was “bent”. It is a pretty nice Raleigh C40 hybrid from the mid 90s with Shimano Altus stuff and nice for a non enthusiast for tooling around. Nice project for me I thought. Turns out he ran into a metal utility box or something similarly unforgiving. The front wheel and unicrown fork are fine, but not so the steel frame.






it looked pretty terminal. This is a slanted top tube bike, but rough protractor measurements put the new improved head tube angle at about 80 degrees. Front center measurement was about 20.5” giving about 2” of toe overlap. For amusement, I cranked on it a bit with a pipe, and the frame corrected ever so slightly before my thick pipe bent. Looking at the bad kink on the downtube, I concluded it’s a goner. Oh well. I thought others might like some amusing photos.

I would say if the impact was sufficient to do that damage the fork is questionable as well.

but what do I know

/markp

RATS!

Did the rider live?

Yes the rider is alive. This maybe happened last year. I do agree that the fork maybe is questionable. I recently straightened an older style fork for a nephew that had a glancing blow from a curb. The tire was even hitting one fork leg. My observation is that newer style unicrown forks while being stronger can more readily damage the frame. With our older bikes we can often just say “fork’s bent” but still have a frame and maybe a chance to straighten the fork.

This reminds me of an old bikelist framebuilders listserv where a guy
”mallard”? Posted about a dead frame he wanted opinions on how to repair.

All of any experience advised recycling.

he then linked to some images that showed what looked like a pound of brass flooded into the top tube.

some are just not capable of taking advice. Suggests the question , why ask then?

Yep , That be dead! Recycle.

Agreed that it is a goner. Stripping it now. If there wasn’t ice on the street, and not a half inch of play in the front bearings, I would’ve carefully pedaled it a short distance to see what something like that geometry felt like before teardown. Not now for sure after tearing it apart. I have my eye on a very nice 1992 Schwinn CrissCross for him that is available.

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have heard some framebuilders refer to the bulge on the underside of the downtube as a "goiter"

wonder if frame would straighten out it you gave it some iodine supplements...


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