Ah, sort of like the '72-'75 Varsities.

1. It depends on the resin - anywhere from months to decades. But it does happen. There's also potential for fatigue.
2. The damage to steel frames is largely a function of abuse - don't crash the bike, and it can last forever. Steel is quite resilient.
3. Based on what I've seen of old carbon fiber - including some of the early aluminum lugged frames - CF frames are generally no longer functional after fifteen or twenty years.

That's not to say that carbon fiber isn't fantastic stuff - from both a riding and production perspective, it's a big jump ahead of metal frames. However, unless someone stuffs a Cervelo in their closet for thirty years, you won't be seeing any in very good condition thirty years from now.


As a college student, wouldn't that make me better qualified to guess?

+1 Taiwan made steel frames i.e. Soma, Surly, Salsa & others are generally made in smaller production runs than that of the mass produced Chinese stuff. Taiwan today is similar to the Japan of the 70' & 80's. From what I have exp. they have a good build quality and an excellent ride quality. They lack lugs and have slightly sloped downtubes, but perform very nicely. They are usually made from high quality steels. 4130 gets a bad rap, but when drawn into tubes it can be crap or very high end. I own a Soma Doublecross DC and a Vassago Bandersnatch 29er. Since I started riding these two bikes about a year ago, my C & V collection has just sat still. Modern Taiwan frames gets a bad rap in this forum, but they are cheaper than custom and still high quality steel. The geometry is slightly more comfortable than the older bikes IMO. These smaller frame companies will have some collector interest 20 years from now. Their steel, so we know thay will be around.

The only Taiwanese bike I've put substantial miles on is my Surly Karate Monkey, and it's the worst riding steel bike I've ever felt. It's heavy and transmits every single movement that's made. It's like riding something Torquemada created. I rode it back from KOP last night and I'm still mentally cursing it as we're talking.

Your Soma felt AWESOME for the limited time I rode it.

That's why I went with the Soma and Vassago. Surlys have a cult following, but I don't care for them. The wheel base on the KM is very short and has a high BB. I think that transmits into the ride quality that you feel. I'll let you try my Vassago. Better geometry longer and lower than the KM. The KM is best set up as a single speed 29er

Does the Vassago have horizontal drops?

No. Vertical. No EBB either. I am running it as a 1 X 9. Vassogo makes a singlespeed frame that can be geared called the Jabberwocky.

My Surly Cross, made in Taiwan, check has a similar ride to my 1971 Raleigh Super Course. I can push it hard through turns, and I can ride it slowly and still be comfortable. For me, it's a very balanced bike. I built it up myself with a mishmosh of road racing components.

I don't see anyone claiming to absolutely know what will and won't be a classic. We're just having fun pontificating.

As a collector of vintage audio gear I find your blank statement ignorant at best. I own twenty or so pairs of vintage speakers including a set of 901 series II. If properly positioned and powered these are a beautiful speaker. And controversial they are.
But since you have no idea concerning the nuances of the series I'm not going to waste my time explaining it.

You do realize there are race cars being displayed, raced and collected. These vehicles incorporated cabon fiber, kevlar and other materials new at the time.
And some these cars are from the early 80's. Thirty years old for some of the McLaren's. But since some of the carbon wonders were built before you were born you may not have known they even exist.

And you can count on a Ferrair Enzo or McLaren F1 being around many, many decades to come.

Up until fairly recently, most "carbon fiber" sports cars were, for the most part, structurally dependent on an aluminum sub frame. All of Ferrari's current lineup - the 458, 599, etc. - have metal frames, as does the Bugatti Veyron, the Lamborghini Murcielago and Gallardo, and so forth.

The McLaren F1 is, on the other hand, a fully carbon fiber vehicle, and several others - the Zonda, Enzo, and Koenigsegg in particular - come quite close. However, there are some important differences between bicycles and cars. Unlike the average featherweight road bicycle, these cars aren't structurally dependent upon the outer millimeter or two of carbon - attacking one with a boxcutter, for example, isn't likely to cause any serious damage. Furthermore, unlike a bicycle, these vehicles are mostly kept under a dust sheet in a garage - many McLarens have less miles on the odometer than some Cervelos.

That said, even these paragons of automotive engineering are vulnerable to the pitfalls of carbon fiber. An Enzo was recently totalled over damage that on a Civic or Taurus could be repaired by any body shop, and resurrecting the car required a complete replacement of the body.

There's also the issue long-term damage. The best examples of these are the featherweight Lotuses and TVRs, which are a far better analog to the construction techniques used in composite bikes. After thirty years, many of these cars are simply coming apart at the seams.

Nuances? This is a speaker with horrendous harmonic distortion at all frequencies, comb filtering galore, and severe roll-off at both high and low frequencies. It doesn't matter how you measure it - as an accurate transducer of electricity to sound, it's rubbish.

(Yeah, I roll my own. )

Your absolutely correct. All carbon fibre vehicles will turn into dust........right.
Even $700 000 supercars.....
A carbon F1 is utterly dependent on its carbon monocoque constuction but comparing a car to a bicycle is not the point. The point being that the carbon lay-up will survive longer than you will be around. You need to think to scale. Its like comparing my steel Maronini to a Twisted Customs chromo buggy.

As far as the 901's go, what series have you owned and what are you powering them with? The bigger question is what kind of room are they in? The later 901's are not as clean as the first two series.
I prefer them for jazz over any of my JBL's or even my Walsh 4.
I would guess to say you've never owned a pair of series II with cloth surrounds.

Dovetailing well with this thread, on a 45 minute walk yesterday I saw three bikes:

A chrome-lugged, boutique Italian (looking) hand-built bike with early Dura-Ace and 531 tubes
A fillet-brazed Stevenson
...a 2010 Scott Addict with Sram Red

I lusted after every single one of these bikes.

Honestly I think for me its a sort of weird combination of loathing the look of new bikes but admiring their sheer performance. The first time I'd seen a bike like the Addict in person was sort of a breath-taking moment, actually. I think I even managed to convince myself it was a pretty bike.

One thing that a few of respondents in this thread might be unaware of is that CF bonding techniques and technology have changed significantly in the 45-50 years that they have been developed, and will continue to. In the last 25 years it has started to become significantly more common. When a technology or material matures, it becomes more available, cheaper to utilize, more versatile, and more reliable. Do you really think that today's high quality CF composite bikes are really designed/manufactured like a Specialized Epic, Giant Cadex, Vitus Carbone, or Trek 2300? I doubt it.

Some obvious relevant developments since that time might be:

- Better resins
- Better bonding techniques
- Better molds
- Much better joining techniques
- Better resistance to ultraviolet light.
- Better understanding of where reinforcement/increased wall thickness is necessary as it applies to the physical demands of cycling
- A better understanding of what carbon fiber's limitations are; including, what shapes it can be molded into, and how distribute loads at critical stress points.

You see, we can't analyze 25 year old bikes to see how long the current bikes are going to last. The best current CF bikes are make with processes and techniques that are only about five to ten years old.

Someone commented on steel fatigue earlier...

I could be mistaken, and I'm NOT a metalurgist or expert, but I thought steel either bent or it didn't. It didn't fatigue with usage. Aluminum does suffer fatigue (which we learned when aluminum air planes kept crashing).

Steel does fatigue, but it takes more stress cycles than other materials. Spokes are a good example. Fatigue is stressing something to BELOW its yield point repeatedly, which lowers its yield point.

Correct.

Aluminum has no fatigue limit, while steel does.

An aluminum structure subjected to repeated stress excursions, no matter how small, will ultimately fail. Because steel has a fatigue limit, however, a steel structure can be subjected to an infinite number of stress excursions below the fatigue limit, and it will not fail from fatigue.

Designers understand this limitation of aluminum as a structural material, and overbuild structures to mitigate the problem.

Pressurized aluminum airplane fuselages are "life-limited" by the number of pressurization/depressurization cycles. After an airframe has experienced the number of cycles designated by the manufacturer as the maximum for that model, it is retired from service and the aluminum is recycled.

Thanks, I thought that was the case. Didn't several planes crash and that's how the issue was discovered?

I thought that two of the biggest advantages steel and titanium offered was not suffering gradual deterioration.

I don't think airplanes led to the discovery of fatigue in aluminum. Perhaps it was ignored.

The problem with all carbon fiber is the very small amount of damage required to render it inoperable. In a crash between my ancient Civic and a Pagani Zonda (which weighs about the same)at 40MPH, my car would be damaged, but not so much that it couldn't be repaired for a few thousand dollars. In contrast, the Pagani would very likely suffer a catastrophic failure of the structure of its' carbon monocoque, effectively totalling it.

Furthermore, carbon fiber bicycles suffer far more abuse than carbon fiber used in cars. Unlike a formula one car or Ferrari, on which the carbon skeleton is well protected, a bicycle's structure is protected only by a few microns of paint. While cars built to be as rigid as possible, bicycle frames are designed with a great deal of flexibility to absorb bumps in the road, which can also eventually lead to failure. A carbon frame is a spectacularly fragile thing, and unless the bicycle is almost never used (which is possible), I doubt many of the ones made today will see out the decade.

The carbon diffuser on an F1 car is a few mm from the road. So is most of the belly for that matter. And not really protected in any way.
I am going to assume you have never seen a modern F1 car up close. Maybe you should use the internet to look at some pics.......
I've recently ridden a 15 year old Trek Y MTB. It has many thousands of miles on it and the basic structure is perfectly sound. I would expect that it will easily be around for another 15 or 20 years. And this bike was very much used and abused back in the day. I may buy this bike eventually.
I think your hate for carbon is somewhat misguided.

If there is a problem with CF, it's more the damage caused by UV light on the resin that they impregnate into the carbon fibers. UV and heat degredation had been seen on early CF mufflers on motorcycles that eventually cause them to yellow severely and break up (heat from the muffler speeds up the breakdown too). the same thing can already be happening on CF bikes with clear finishes. Companies that use CF extensively have learned to add in UV inhibitors in their resin to fight this, but I suspect that the inhibitor does not entirely prevent UV degredation from happeing. That's why, I would say that painted CF bikes might last a bit longer than clear finished ones.
My 85 Vitus Carbone is now going on 25 years already, it certainly feels very solid on the road and also when I was building it up, there was no hint of loosness on any of the lugs/joints. The frame actually rang when you tap it, just like a steel one does. I suspect that the flat black paint on the bike applied in the factory is also helping preserve the frame. Eventually, as all organic based materials do, it will break down, but the way the frame still feels/rides today, I would not expect that to happen anytime soon.

Chombi

This is why for all practical purposes, bike frames made from aluminum have a VERY marginal weight advantage over steel. In order to make it strong enough so as to not deflect and fatigue, it has to be nearly as heavy as the steel component (assuming they're of similar quality) would be.

You CAN make an aluminum frame that won't break from fatigue, but it'll be nearly as heavy as a comparable steel frame, and from a frame standpoint, less comfortable to ride. That can be mitigated with wheel/tire choice, seatpost choice, etc., but in my not-so-humble opinion, a large steel frame that flexes just gives a better ride.

Tis true but I love the look of the early c-dales and the big tubes. I'd like to own another someday.