You know THAT will void the warranty, right?

steel is real...good boat anchor.

OP...let us know how you get on with the new frame.
Question is...are the latest Madones a press fit for BB30 bearings? Trek took big criticism for having BB30 bearings be slip fit and wonder if they changed?

Will they not let you keep the old frame?

I talked with my LBS about Madones a couple of months back, asked how they were holding up and specifically asked about the bottom bracket. I wanted to find out if they have had any issues with them. The guy told me that a few (4 or so) years ago they did see two or three bikes that came in with your kind of problem, but the newer ones were holding up great. My guess is that since you are the original owner and I am sure you bought it from an LBS, you will be given one of the newer frames.

And Trek appears to be one of them, so long as you can prove that you're the original owner.

No. They might even want to see it (they would certainly want the old frame destroyed).

Maybe that's why Canon doubled the shutter life in their new camera by making it out of carbon.

If you want to troll, they set up a subforum specifically for that.

It went out with a whimper, not a bang.

A light press fit, if they made it correctly. At the LBS, we have some bearings that are a skosh oversized for the frames that have a sloppy fit with the normal bearings. Pro tip for anyone planning to install one: put it in the freezer to shrink it, and warm the frame to expand it, before you attempt the pressing. The bearing is oversized because there's a super-thin shim on the outside, and it can crumple quite easily. Oh, and it's not BB30.

On the original topic, what would irk me is having my bike be offline while getting this taken care of. If you're missing training, racing, or important rides, it's not strictly no-harm no-foul anymore. Also, the customer is supposed to pick up the tab on labor, which would come to about $150 where I work.

Fortunately I have other bikes I can train and race on. It will end up costing me a bottom bracket and headset and the labor to install these.

I took the frame to the shop today. It will be a week or more before I get a response from Trek's warranty department, but the guys at the shop were almost 100% sure it would be covered and I would be getting a new frame.

From what you described, I'd be pretty confident they'd cover it too. We've had to really lean on them for coverage on chainstay breakage, however.

Always get a kick out of this comment from guys with carbon forks. FWIW I've broken a bunch of steel frames over the years. And doing some research a few years back steel components were around 75% of the most recalled bike parts.

And aside from the obvious dogma, "steel is real" is bad writing. It indicates that all other material is not real, and therefor imaginary or an hallucination. I've taken enough drugs in my time to know that the welt I got from getting clocked with an aluminum baseball bat in a brawl was not something I conjured up in an altered state. The three breasted stripper was.

Especially if those products fail on a regular basis.

Like this.

Governer Petomane said it best: "We have to protect our phony baloney jobs!"

Incorrect. Brazing is done with brass on bike frames. If you've never played with it. brass is considerably softer than steel. The effective result of brazing is quite similar to glue. Welding comes with it's own issues. And your presumption that carbon is softer than steel shows you haven't been paying much attention to bike parts. Or at least never rode an old steel frame.

I didn't get a "harumph" out of that guy!

I simplified slightly for the audience. Brass, yes, is softer than steel by some margin, but not orders of magnitude softer as is the case with comparing carbon composite to any metal. The metallurgical bond between brass and steel is also quite a bit stronger than the bond between glue and metal or even glue and carbon composite.

As far as carbon composite being softer than steel; of course it is. Two issues:

1) you confuse the nominal strength of a strand of carbon fiber with the overall strength of the bulk composite. Carbon strands are incredibly stiff, but they are set in a relatively soft epoxy matrix. The bulk material property is the combined effect of these two materials.

2) you are confusing structural strength with a material property. The advantage of carbon is you can shape it in such a way as to make a very stiff bike frame for the weight. Obviously if you were not weight constrained, you could make a very much stiffer frame out of steel.

No, I'm not. If you're talking carbon strands vs. a metal in it's manufactured state then yes, metal is "harder". But carbon is never used as a "stand alone" in bike frames, it's obviously laid into epoxy resin, the end product, depending on that resin can certainly durometer out harder than a whole bunch of metals.

And you're dead wrong about brazed joints being stronger than glued, certainly for shear strength depending on joint clearances and design. Some industrial epoxies can produce double the shear value of your average brazed joints. I'm probably one of the few people commenting on this that has worked with both BTW.

Epoxy can frequently be stronger than the material it is gluing together.

Um, I have a spool of carbon tow sitting on my desk that would suggest that carbon fibers are actually quite soft and supple - not even as rigid as a hair on your head. It is when they are brought together as threads, woven into fabrics, and introduced into a matrix that they begin to have much structure. Individual carbon fibers are simply nylon fibers that have been altered through chemical and thermal treatments.

First, epoxy is actually the softer of the two materials in CF composite. It makes no sense for the matrix material to be harder than the filler. I mean, does anything improve if you make a composite out of steel matrix and cooked pasta noodle filler? On the flip side, how about a matrix of cooked pasta (or other soft material) with steel strands? It does make sense to cushion a strong but brittle material with a softer material. It would not surprise me if the bulk material property of carbon strand is stronger than that of steel.

Again, this is confusing geometry with material properties. Epoxies can have huge shear values because they are laid up in extremely thin layers and cured in place. Brazed joints, to my knowledge at least, have to have a comparably loose fit in order to wick the brazing material up into the joint. Make up a bulk (say, 1/4 inch diameter rod) tension test sample of any epoxy and I don't think it will show higher tensile strength than brass.

That is... on very well brazed/welded. If the temperature of brazing wasn't proper, contamination, etc... well... brazing/weld doesn't really... hold it...

my bike is made from [-((carbon fiber)^2)]^.5, thus my bike is non-real.

The carbon fiber (which doesn't resist compression very well) adds tensile strength and the epoxy (which doesn't resist stretching very well) adds compression strength. Like rebar in concrete. (I suspect you know this but other people might not.)

Current carbon frames are more like the "monolithic" structure (except for the bonded-in metal bits). They aren't just tubes glued together (anymore).

Resolution:

The warranty claim was accepted and I'll be getting a new Madone 4.6 frameset (closest in tech to my original 5.2). I'm a little bummed because of the geometry change Trek made to its mid-line bikes; the headtube is a full inch taller than my old bike (including headset) which means the new frame will have to be a 56cm instead of the original 58cm. The original race geometry is available only on the top of the line 6.x series Madones; just a head's up in case anyone is looking at buying a Trek for racing purposes.

Good to hear. So a 58cm with a slammed -17 stem wasn't better for ya than the 56cm, eh?

Not too stir up trouble. Isnt 5 series over 4 series? Did you ask to upgrade for a cost to the 6 series?

Already have a slammed -17 stem. An 18cm headtube is the tallest my position can utilize (stem is positioned 19cm from the crown of the fork). The 58cm "H2" fit has a 19cm headtube. If I left the bearing cap completely off and put the stem right down on the bearing itself, I could get away with it, but this is only really acceptable on the track where the bike doesn't see water (not to mention the bolt of lightning from the gods of aesthetics).

It is, but the bike is over 4 years old and technology has moved on. It's fine with me actually; I'm a bit old school and external cables and a standard seatpost match my aesthetics better than the internal cable routing and seatmast featured on the 5.x frames. I was given the option of accepting a $1600 discount on any other frameset, but I have no desire to spend a big chunk of money on a frame at this point.

All that makes perfect sense to me.