Carbon Fibre Bike Frames… What No One Is Telling You!

the carbon fiber expert Rob is back by popular demand as the back is stuck between his sweaty legs this video was completely off the cuff with zero planning but there was way too much good info streaming from Rob's mouth for this not to reach YouTube take a hexel while it's loaded and just Nick the middle of it and see how many people will be squinted so that we'll talk about the weight of frames I wish the bike was a bit heavier in this in this Headroom we'll talk about the evolution of carbon bike frames and the common issues that Rob Sees at a bad moment how different frame shapes affect the rider and Rider Comfort where do you give the rider any relief we also May touch a nerve for a few people this brexit in which is great all this info from Rob comes from over 12 years experience and 14 000 carbon bike frames fixed by carbon bike repair UK so let's get into it shall we we want to talk about the evolution of carbon frames right with carbon fiber what have we what have we achieved from this Frame yeah to this Frame and you say well firstly the weight the weight difference I mean arguably they be similar size but this one is a lot heavier and you'd say well how is that possible first of all carbon carbon bikes has been such a good thing for the industry I mean yeah we had so little options when we had steel frames and then aluminum there's still limited options with shapes and is that the carbon is it's like it's just amazing stuff it's allowed the guys to go crazy with shapes designs yeah put DNA into these bicycles that no one can spot and then you create a special thing about it as it's constantly evolving so by the time this one gets into this hand and this becomes the old one yeah what's going to be this Frame I see what you mean where is it going it's constantly going weight has almost been neutralized now wait wait yeah yeah they're so light now how did you get any lighter yeah and then you start hearing things like I'm starting to hear things like I wish the bike was a bit heavier in this in this room or going down it was just blowing me all over the place I prefer to write something like this yeah the main thing is as we talked about with your trip Fox yeah it's the way they lay up bikes a professional bike compared to a bike that's maybe copying something is understanding that the entire process comes down to you know the way the bike is laid up yeah designed laid up and what does function is it takes an engineer to work out what the purpose of the spike is yeah whereas I thought with the tripox it was a bit it didn't know what I wanted to be with an aero bike or was it going to be a yeah a climbing bike where there's a lot of thought going into this and and even at this at this age yeah this bike was at its highest level of Technology yeah and all the stuff that they had available to them at a bad moment you could see the way this is laid up you can see the cross ply okay okay it's going at 45 degrees and you've got the straight uniweave running this way you've got all sorts of things you'll probably find in here yep there's twill in here which you don't see much now on Modern frames it's interesting to see the evolution of carbon frames side by side and we'll look at an older Bianchi later in the video as well who knows where we are heading lighter heavier thicker thinner they say Trends come back around so maybe we'll all be riding penny farthings in 10 years time this uh for example on a lot of modern frames now you don't see alloy in carbon anymore um the two materials should never be put together no you should never never put those two materials together if you kind of make that one molded item and the problem is very simple this uh doesn't react to temperature it doesn't adjust it doesn't Flex the carbon stays the same the alloy will okay so the Matrix that's supposed to hold the epoxy that's supposed to hold this spot to this part yeah it's under enormous amount of pressure as it gets hotter hotter colder hotter colder stress sit in the sun while having a coffee yeah you know the carbon is happy yeah the epoxy is you know it's saying which which where do you want me to go and over the few years you start seeing cracks you start seeing I don't know there's a lot of your viewers who will have seen and their bottom brackets come loose so they change out things like dropouts yeah these are not these are all the aluminum dropouts which I prefer to carbon you have a look at this again it's easy to criticize the brands it really is bike mechanics are known to criticize some of the ideas and some of them are Justified because they're reacting to maybe a warranty issue that's happened so they'll they'll modify the bike as quickly as possible either modify the mold like you saw or start afresh and then never go near that issue again and then they'll do press foot bearings which kind of work but maybe the design is not quite there so they start having problems there these guys are going to understand have a tiny bit of empathy for the manufacturer in developing a high-end but it's not a simple thing yeah it's not simple at all we've got to have some empathy my friends we are riding complex carbon machines and it's interesting hearing it from Rob who works on hundreds of frames each month I can see how the cracks and breaks in these frames makes Rob empathetic given the development is driven by the consumer and that leads us on to the next Point nicely so obviously it would be nice if you weren't you know the audience wasn't the bug fixer yeah true true I mean I know they do try before they put the bikes up but they got it they got to keep this ball rolling because we're getting the benefit of riding amazing bikes yeah so yeah what's the price you pay the price for an incredibly High demanding audience who want a bike that looks with a with a drop top tube or it's about the lightest it's got to look right you know it's got to have like for example this sort of malarkey here yeah is is an iteration of uh of something yeah I'm not quite sure why they did this because this bike would be a vertically very uncompliant and very uncomfortable to ride what's that because of the there's nowhere for the seat tube to flex because it's blocked now The BMC did this Cannondale have done this now there could be a good reason that I've missed don't get me wrong it could be something I'm not seeing yeah but there are a lot of designs and I'm not referring to this only that are forced upon manufacturers to follow suit yeah wear bicycles either look good yeah or whether the world champion has won something on that bike it looks like that you've got to kind of go down that road even if it's not a good idea yeah yeah it's still going to go down that road until either the warranty department is a war zone you think about it it's really not good for the consumer because when bicycle companies go down there's just less choices less competition I'm not here to criticize yeah I'm here to empathize actually yeah I do see some things that definitely need criticism yeah because there's some things that are overlooked and design you'd be surprised there's some brands that absolutely fly on the face of reason when it comes to design particularly with regard to what carbon is capable of doing and what it's not doing change for change sake or change for the better or change because of consumers me and you that does get the old mine Palace working this type of example um when bicycles were converted from Wheels were converted from aluminum wheels to carbon so another evolution in this but the problem is that the way that a clincher works yeah is designed around extrude War thicknesses yeah yeah that are based on aluminum yeah so you can't just convert it but they have okay so they did convert them they just converted them because they the way the beading sits and where the brake calipers sit both on because you need to be able to swap between aluminum wheel and a carbon so you can't have a fatter wall then it's about the braking surfaces etc etc these are pressures that I've applied typical pressures that are applied to companies where they would if you were asked them honestly would you want to go down that road you'd say no yeah you've got companies like mavic who said look some of it will keep carbon and the other parts will make aluminum there and and so you get adhesion problems again between the materials because they don't belong together yeah and you get warping down you know it's so I'm really happy to see disc brakes have finally come on awful a few feathers yeah does this remove that problem and allowed you to ride a carbon wheel now without the issues of the rim of carbon that makes I mean that just doesn't make sense in my mind full stop to have a carbon braking service slowly grind down yeah and you see kind of see the stuff here when you see all the broken bikes across the brands and you can start seeing very very easily yeah um what is working and what's not I'm sure that is going to spark a lovely Rim brake versus disc brake discussion ding ding ding go on fight it out in the comments so it appears we basically used a design that was meant for aluminum but simply swap the material to carbon fiber interesting let's take dropouts for as an example if you ask me regardless of weight and and and and and its potential to win a race would I prefer an aluminum dropper over a carbon one and I would say absolutely 100 yeah why because carbon does not abrade well if you rub it with uh with sandpaper it just turns to powder okay you do that with aluminum you'll struggle yeah yeah so if you have a loose skewer and a drop out and you and trust me we've repaired more of these than any 99 dropouts carbon from the day we started 12 years ago all carbon Dropout problems so that tells you clearly the decision to go carbon has been possibly because of this bonding the relationship between these two alien materials forcing them together and then just running out of steam to try and solve why the paint is cracking on the join line yeah so you just said just go carbon and we'll see how far we go some of the older bikes if you remember I'm not sure they still do that had little washer faces on the aluminum ones which are brilliant brilliant yeah because then you had the benefits of carbon light right with no bond issues with an aluminum face yeah and they took that away why was it too expensive did they fall off were they worried about them falling away I don't know it's the change I guess so they've gone to through axle which has kind of solved a few issues there so that's nice to see that again it's a constant evolution so this brand and they're not they're not alone has chosen not to put a face on this carbon Dropout you feel the aluminum one there's hardly anywhere you can see some marks on it from the skewer grippers yeah and then you look at this one with just a similar age and you can feel the rich and it not only wears the outside as soon as the skewer is compressed down and there's there's pressure and it starts to eat the carbon away it starts to get looser when it gets looser the axle that's sitting in this Ridge starts to move up and down back and forth particularly on the chainstay side yeah so what some of the manufacturers have done is on this broken hanger they've actually put the hanger in the way of the Dropout to stop the Dropout from ex wearing on the drive side because the chain side is pulling more than the non-drive side nothing like turning your lovely carbon drop out into a grinding mill what can we do people I like the aluminum face that makes sense to me but then we're back to aluminum bonded to carbon let me know your experiences down below and what you think now this is a point that I need to make about road bikes time trial bikes and mountain bikes they are the test bed for a very popular bicycle which is a road bike yeah they test all kinds of things mountain bike with a through axle and and many other things yeah time trial bike various aspects of that bike's functionality and they trial them excuse the pun yeah yeah and then they start to adopt them it is I mean there's there's all sorts of issues that uh uh say UCI compliant road bike would have over a non-ucr compliant bicycle and you can see here the UCR compliant bike has a clear label on the front in the ECI Clause it says the bike must be available to purchase in order for it to qualify for UCI race and there's a again there's a lot of negativity about that and it stopped the evolution of has that always been the case is that always well I don't know when that Clause can be that's been going for a long time and it's a it's basically a leveler it's a it's a leveler and it's a good thing because when you train really hard you can't get in a in a big team with a with a bike that's made especially for them yeah it's a bit like Formula One there's a rule yeah by the FIA that controls the development yeah it keeps the costs down as well yeah but in the case of both Sports just to con comply with UCI and beat your component opponent means you even spend more money so that hasn't kind of worked the issue with the UCI compliance has mean it's that they've had to produce a bicycle that's still cool yeah it's still evolving yeah yeah I mean we could talk about the Dogma 60.5 which was one of the first fantastic iterations of a bicycle yeah that had squiggly forks and everyone thought well that's really what was well that's you know is it a trendy thing very clever bite yeah very unique directly at the bike and they're doing that Trek has done it with internal um seed post flexible seed posts on an arrow front end of the Dome nine fantastic bike again what is that rear the rear the the bearing called the isotherm ISO oh what do they have in there yeah I'm not sure yeah ISO fix there's not a lot sometimes on a road bike that they can develop anymore keep pushing compared to that giant I showed you earlier so the UCI keeps it a Level Playing Field if it's anything like formula one though I'm sure there's a bit of raw bending I can see why you need those guidelines though or we'll be riding some absolutely crazy funky frames and carbon frame shapes talk tools talk tools must have a talk tool calibrate a talk tool it's very important um that they'll talk until they break and then they'll reverse the torque setting yeah to a point that's pretty safe unless the something happened in the manufacturing which is why they will warranty their background breaks but they know that bike backwards and if it's broken what we call a interaction interface okay where the owner or the mechanic has something to do with it in interface we're going to put something in yeah tighten it bottom bracket anything those are generally not warrantied well one of the biggest changes so this is something I wanted to put in yeah was when you when you put a bicycle through an error tile yeah and then you work out the most amazing way of compressing carbon into the thinnest of all thicknesses there's not much further you can go other than change shapes you know the Fashion's sake yeah but one of the areas that don't get talked about because it's not very exciting bit of the bike me too from what we're seeing here is developing a huge pace and that is because the bikes have got to a point where they're so efficient one area that they hadn't accounted for was bright as fatigue yeah fatigue yeah so you put them on an old veg yeah and an old Dogma I don't know if you've ever ridden one of those books but they are hard bikes okay super fast every bit of what comes out of the pedal there's hardly any lateral compliance it's it goes but you are dead tired at the end of the day it's installed yeah with uh with the Madonna nine was one of the first steps trick and the others Cannondale did it with a they started working with the seat tubes making them different the Sargon bike I think had a forked end down by the bottom bracket yeah I started to really mess around with this part to try and give the rider some flexibility anyway yeah yeah because a lot of people see these yeah see today as the Comfort mechanism of a bike yeah but those things should not move at all why because the back wheel if you can see that shape yeah it comes up to there so this thing flexed you'd be you'd be banging into there so that isn't what the seat stays there for thin seed stays just mean lighter weight yeah so where do you give the rider any relief I'm going to see it too basically this part of the bike is like a crossbow yeah yeah absolutely yeah if you apply weight yeah to the saddle yeah the rider goes back yeah okay this part bows forward so it's under that attention it's under tension yeah so what they're looking at now is that if you stop that from bowing yeah you've got to control it but if you stop it like it's happening here then you might as well have a thick Post in here because you can't do anything with this there's a lot of development work going on these frames and you can sometimes you can see them clearly sometimes not so clear but you could over Flex it which would mean that the back tail gets whippy okay and it gets whippy and you you don't feel confident the back wheels on the floor yeah so you need to start dialing back and the beauty of what I said earlier about developing bicycles of carbon without changing the mold yeah is you add carbon you take carbon away yeah it's amazing yeah and you can dial that back in like a like a finely tuned piano it's really brilliant this is me playing the piano plus I just actually wanted some air time it seems there is plenty of development in and around the seat tube hopefully making us all a little bit more comfortable in the long run so this is like an evolution happening right here these guys are looking at this design again this is the best thing at this time right you've got um aluminum down here fine you've got bolts Allen key bolts you can take them off replace them great the factors of that aluminum you don't either have to replace them but it was nice it was nice to have which you don't have now then you've got this enormous chunk of material here for no reason and then you've got absolutely no consideration at all it's just a circulatory it's just a circular tube which stops this part from collapsing because it's like a house of cards if you think about that if it collapses this way if you get it's almost like tension if you get hit from the rear yeah right the rider goes back actually the bike goes forward because the vehicle is faster than the road so that tension because the bike is stuck between your sweaty legs it's literally like it literally is the saddle is locked in yeah you're locked in there so that pressure from the top plus you'll yeah if you like 80 kilos or whatever there's a lot of tension going down on the end of the seat post so it's like you said it's there being about an hour and then take a crossbow and take it and take it hacksaw while it's loaded and just Nick the middle of it and see how many people will be squinted that's why the sea tube's so important as well and because it's under that tension no no one has had any consideration here this is the safest route right but they have had no consideration for the rider what's it it's not this company's fault yeah at this period they were all doing the same thing they were working on things like this getting more shape into you see the way the the asymmetric shape a lot of angles and things to try and stiffen up this whippiness that's happening on the back so we're just getting them so they were dealing with this part of the bike at in this era dealing with this area dealing with the tubes lots of funny shapes foreign stuff around here and they've missed this bit yeah this bit was a bit right I was incredibly fatigued on a bike like this but everybody was the same so it didn't matter I'm not sure about you but I'd still love one of those Bianchi frames even if it does feel like I'm riding a brick down the road I must admit this Frame really did stand out but I'm sure the eagle-eyed amongst you spotted the huge crack in the top of the seat stay which makes this a write-off and also makes me pretty sad to fight on the evolution side then is that I'll ask you is there anything you would like to see or the thing you'd like to see the most I I don't know if there's anything with no disc brakes are in which is great I'd like to see carbon dry Parts Disappear Completely yeah I think they've got to get rid of that I'd like to see a better solution for anything that's going to be clamped by a human being yeah this should be a better system it's really unfair uh when you're producing a high performance bicycle yeah to give it to somebody who's not mechanically minded yeah yeah that's true to to then suck up the result of a crack because an aluminum or metal it might bulge a little bit and you could probably Hammer attack yourself yeah but when this goes you really are awesome you're in for a retail discounted yeah replacement frame so it's not a very user-friendly thing carbon fiber you'd like these things have got to be changed yeah these are compressed in um riveted bottle cage holders and if you tweak them just a little bit too tight they start to spin yeah they lose a great lizard yeah this is a really bad thing as a reward for making it this far in the video here is a sneak peek of what else we got up to on the day [Music] a big thanks to Rob for sharing his knowledge and letting me record and hassle him for a whole day if you haven't already do watch this video where we cut up this Chinese carbon frame and found something pretty bad inside it wasn't good

Channel: Jourdain Coleman

Views: 280,986

Keywords: carbon fiber, carbon bike frame, carbon fiber frame expert, are carbon fiber frames any good, carbon fiber frame design, carbon bike frame manufacturing, carbon fiber frame manufacturing, carbon fiber frame technology, carbon fiber bike frames, carbon fiber expert, Carbon fiber frame benefits

Id: CXIpU92mTwI

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023