Roasted

Would have been a heckuva swing to the car door to actually accomplish that dent, I would think. I've had that happen with absent minded people getting out of my car in the garage and flinging the door open and hitting my hardtail that never sees the road (permanently used on trainer). Despite the dent on my edge of the car door that hit the bike, there was no dent to the aluminum hardtail frame. *shrug*

wiscoerik

Honest opinion from a non-expert: I wouldn't ride it at 220#. Best of luck if you do.

neebone

Not to my knowledge. I think my wife knocked over and it hit the arm of a chair or maybe a closet door.

fishymamba

Ride it! Just keep an eye on the dent. I had my CAAD 9 for 2 weeks and my sister ran over it with her car. I was almost crying after I saw the bike.

urbanknight

Aluminum road frames, especially super lightweight ones with super butted tubes, have very thin walls in the middle. The top tube on my Tsunami was so thin, it looked like a beer can where it started sheering itself in half.

That dent was caused by an empty Mills Pride cabinet coming off the wall. The previous owner of the house had hung it using 16 screws... all into the drywall only

neebone

I talked to the LBS today. They want to see it in person. They said I could get a Caad 10 for 40% off. Basically becasuse of a mystery dent, I will be riding around on a $2200 cadd10 5. My road bike hobby may be a short lived one. Maybe I should just stick to running. I can buy a lot of pairs of running shoes for $2200.

Phantoj

You could get a Pedal Force carbon frameset and swap parts over. Then sell the CAAD on ebay... you won't get much for it, but you'll probably get a little. Sell the fork separately.

BigAura

With you being a big guy that dent will fail at some point, sell it on ebay to a featherweight (with full disclosure), get the new bike...knee replacement surgery is $40,000.

slowandsteady

Make the wife get a second job to pay for the replacement.

neebone

Good Point.

I'll just have to go without riding a few months until I can save up for a new frame. The only bad thing is that there probably aren't a lot of featherweights out there who ride a 63cm caad9.

lpolliard

Come on guinea pig...have a paintless dent remover jerk that dent out and report back to us on the fix. I would/will if/when I dent my CAAD8.

You all act like two minor deflections of this aluminum will make this alloy uber brittle, it won't. Returning the tube to its original shape (or closer to it) will only improve its structural integrity.

Flame on all you pseudo metallurgists!

urbanknight

I would personally ride it while saving up for a replacement. It is highly unlikely that it will spontaneously snap. Top tubes are under compression, so you'll start to feel the frame go noodley and see the tube start to wrinkle like a crushing soda can long before anything dramatic happens. Like I said, it took mine over a year to get to the point that it was unsafe to ride, and my dent looked worse than yours. Mine actually had a tiny hole in the middle of the dent, which seems to be what started the tube shearing itself in half.

collegeskier

Buckling generally considered catastrophic failure as the soda can crushes rapidly once it starts to go.

urbanknight

Exactly. Mine took at least a year to "start to go". Although catastrophic failure is a possibility, it is much more likely that the OP will feel the frame go noodly when cornering or waving the bars back and forth. That was my first clue to look under the sticker, and my inspection made me realize that had I been checking the dent frequently, I would have caught it long before then, even. I don't know how much longer the frame would have lasted after that noodly feeling, but I didn't want to find out.

SwingBlade

Hard to tell from the pictures. Maybe it is the shadowing. Pictures #1 and #2 don't look too terrible but picture #3 is a big red flag. So, if picture #3 is an accurate representation and that crease is as depicted therein, I would be very concerned.

All I can say is beware of safety advice from macho men. I'm your size and have a fair amount of experience in metal fatigue and accident investigation. I'm not saying I wouldn't ride it very cautiously for a little while if my funds were tight. However, I am saying that everyday I would be prepared to have my wife visit me in the hospital while uttering the immortal words, "I told you so!"

And she would too ... that's why I love her.

slushlover2

As mentioned earlier, fill the top tube with water, plug the ends and freeze it.

collegeskier

The failure you described was fracture. Fracture of metals is generally less catastrophic and generally a tension failure or shear failure. Buckling as I was talking about, really is a not there then all of a sudden buckled sort of things normally. It wont effect the bikes stiffness much until it is too late.