PeteHski

When it comes to cars I consider Vintage to be primitive pre WW2 junk. So for bicycles I would be thinking of a similar era. I certainly wouldn’t call anything that was made only 20 years ago “Vintage”. I wouldn’t even call it “Classic”, which in my mind is pre 1990, although I might soon revise that to pre 2000 as the years tick by 😂

SurferRosa

JohnDThompson 

Not a dumb idea; one that made use of existing materials and technologies. The bonded frames used a familiar frame assembly process, and was used before finite element analysis, hydroforming, and other methods of building non-tubular frames became feasible.

terrymorse 

Gluing together highly stressed members with dissimilar mechanical properties? I'd call that dumb, but that's just me.

Reportedly, for some of those frames, storing them in an enclosed car on a sunny day was enough to overstress the joints.

PeteHski

FEA was around well before these frames. The bike industry was just slow to make efficient use of composites. Bonding round carbon tubes to alloy lugs was not the best use of composites (although it was feasible and I did own an early Cadex frame in the mid 90s which held up well).

Kapusta

I have no definition for vintage, I just know it when I see it.

Your bike is not vintage, IMO.

Jeff Neese

Reportedly, for MOST of those frames, they have held up well for decades.

I'm not a big fan of the idea of bonded frames, but that's psychological and denies the qualities of advanced adhesives. This isn't like the Gorilla Glue that you have in your cupboard. As for heat, they used adhesive to fasten heat shield tiles to the space shuttle, and most of those stayed on during re-entry.

So instinctively we may not like the idea, but in actuality you don't see reports of all those bonded frames coming apart after all these years. Recognize that "carbon" bikes are about 30% resin, and all of the metal parts are bonded into that frame. Of course once in a while a bonded joint will fail, but it's not very common.

Personally, the only bonded joint I trust is chromoly steel bonded to chromoly steel, using lugs and silver solder, preferably put together by hand. But I recognize that's all in my head.

PeteHski

Carbon to alloy bonding can cause problems and is fairly well documented. But such frames can still last decades depending on use and environment. But personally I wouldn’t go near a 90s carbon frame with alloy lugs 30 years later. There was nothing special enough about the way they rode anyway even to take a small risk.

Carbon to carbon bonding doesn’t concern me at all.

terrymorse 

Yeah, FEA is about as old as computers: Univac 1100, drum storage, 64K words of core memory, FORTRAN IV, punch cards, swapping in and out sections of the matrix because the core was too small.

Stone knives and bearskin.

The space junk that may or may not still be up in orbit was designed using punch card FEA. Some of it by your humble servant -- what a brain-damaging torture that was.

Daniel_dap

30 years old?

1989Pre 

Sounds about right. That's when STI's first came out. Enter the new age.

rsbob 

Spoken like someone familiar with the collector car market.