I Asked a Carbon Expert 12 Direct Questions About Carbon Frames!

today we are asking a carbon fiber expert 12 challenging questions from the lifespan of carbon now I need to be very clear about this what are the best carbon frames that's a that's a difficult question because it's like apples and pears carbon versus aluminium versus steel the thing with carbon and this is the difference between any other material and a composite material also Rob's thoughts on cheap Chinese carbon frames if you asked me this question back then when you bought those bikes 10 years ago I'd say you got lucky and much much more Rob has over 12 years experience and him and his team have repaired over 14,000 carbon fiber frames now a big thank you to you guys for posting these questions on my community tab you guys ask so here we are without any physical damage caused by a crash or impact Etc what would you say is a lifespan of a carbon frame again it's a very difficult one to answer if it's in a you know if you're doing some weekend writing and you don't take it too seriously bike will last you forever if you don't you don't knock it about recently there's been some studies done one specific one at McLaren where they were testing fatigue on carbon components in Formula 1 racing cars and discovered that there was indeed a level of delamination inside these frames now I need to be very clear about this for the average average Rider to delaminate uh bottom brackets chain stay Junction is going to be a lifelong exercise if you're a pro putting out massive Watts over time that bike will get a little whippy would you notice it as an amateur probably not but the pro would because he's on that bike all day long so the short of it is yes a bike can get whiper a carbon bike where first we didn't think that was the case it is the case but it is very rare that you can actually get to over Flex the bike to a point where it does that level of delamination so probably the simple answer is no it will probably last you a lifetime there is uh there is also this uh preconception that carbon is vulnerable to UV and uh chemicals and water Ingress winter riding and so on so forth carbon in itself is pretty uh innate once the Matrix that's the glue cures the only thing that can really affect a carbon frame and and not so much the carbon but the glue that glues it together is heat what are the top three three best quality frames in your experience as far as build quality and durability that's a that's a difficult question because it's like apples and pears and I'm not I'm not trying to skirt the question because the the it's a it's a very valid question I said in carbon your safest bike to ride is the one with the most carbon in it yeah if you're looking for a lightweight bike and you want to do heel climbs and so on that's your thing that's going to be light you're going to sacrifice structural wall thickness Integrity basically from puncturing is going to be your biggest issue not necessarily weight issue on the frame that will make the bike break when near to pothole but its ability to be able to handle falling on on the side of a pavement on you know something falling on the top jeep if you asked me this about steel bikes or aluminum bikes I would have said the best quality aluminum or you know the style of The Branding because there isn't much that you can do with Alloys once they you know in bulk but in carbon is different there's so many different permutations on where you can make a bike I've just said your safest bet is to go probably with the biggest brands the brands with the biggest uh research and development side the brands that do the least amount of magj experimentation crazy looking bikes I think that's probably where you want to be you know I won't mention names but the the main brands are probably your safest bit although your focus is on carbon what do you think about other frame materials like titanium steel and aluminium now you left bamboo out you can make a bike out of many different things it just depends on whether it's fit for purpose in the old days the only reason we have such a legacy of Steel frames in the beginning was because steel was available so they made by ex of Steel there's some good things about crystalline materials that absorb um stresses much easier aluminium you know there's a progress on from from steel to aluminum aluminium becomes available they're able to draw alum into different shapes just before the carbon world came alive carbon wasn't really available at that time it was more the Aerospace industry which is why so many carbon people talk about this Aerospace thing which is yeah it's a bit it's a bit long in the tooth now titanium again there's no specific reason why titanium is any better yes corrosion but then stainless steel blah blah blah it goes on the thing with carbon and this is the difference between any other material and a composite material is that carbon you can shape any which way you can get really exciting bicycles you can get really interesting bicycles you can get really high performance bicycles you can get bicycles that uh can take a lot of damage down downhill riding there's a there's I'm not saying they are all positive there's some negative things about carbon but if you want a bike that has low weight then you're going to have to sacrifice the strength robustness of the of the frame there's a Human Being Human Being puts that out that much power you put a bicycle between their legs they're going to be doing something with that with that particular bike whether they're touring around the world or they're climbing all the mountains and the Alps I mean I'm digressing but there isn't any one particular material that's better all around than others so carbon is just a very very exciting material to be working with and it's probably in my view carbon fiber is almost designed for bicycles and the way that you can get them to the weight that they're at in terms of carbon vers steel would you say it's a time and a place for Beach no I mean there's a real there's a real concern we were talking about it earlier when we were in the in the workshop about communication where the carbon brands are not really communicating as well as they should be to customers in the sense that there are limitations to carbon yes they are the most incredible until you've ridden a carbon bicycle I don't believe you've actually really ridden a bicycle all around frankly steel bikes are wonderful they've got their own strengths they got their own characteristics there have been comments about now I'm never getting on a carbon bike seeing all the damage that's done on a on a uh on these bikes and how easy they are to break well if you go and look at Jordan's one of Jordan's videos when I challenged him to break a bike with a hammer um he started off tapping it and then ended up struggling to delaminate it and in some other ways I'm sure there's many of the cyclists out there that would attest to just having touched the bike somewhere or dropped something on it and it's broken depends what bike that that object landed on same with a steel bike Aluminum Bike if you have an accident on that bike I challenge you to try and straighten that frame or to try and repair that in the same way that you can carbon so although there's some upsides to Steel frames they're certainly not structurally a strong that's a fact we know that depending again how light carbon bikes are getting now compared to an average steel bike at what price is it better to purchase a carbon frame over an alloy frame performance that's not to say that alloy frames can't perform cuz there'll be a lot of you screaming at me now um it's not the case it's just that you can take an alloy frame to a certain point and then after that point is the junction point you you're kind of asking me that question is if if I was trying to beat my last straa time up a mountain and i' got to my full level of Fitness The Only Way Forward is to get onto a carbon frame and you will improve that time the average alloy frames are really nice bikes they're robust they're very handy most of them don't get nicked anymore there's a lot of practicality reasons to having alloy uh and steel frames steel frames prone to rust but they they hold their value really well especially the Italian Brands they just soaring in prices because they you they don't really make them anymore what carbon bikes would you buy for yourself at a budget range mid-range and top of the range let's uh start with budget range first um any any carbon bike any carbon bike probably produced from around 2005 up anytime below that there's a little bit too much development work going too many things going wrong particularly with the aluminium um uh galvanic corrosion all that kind of stuff medium range I would go secondhand uh on eBay and get the bike checked over by a carbon specialist for sure you get a lot of bang for your buck they don't sell for that much as a lot of carbon bikes around you can get a really good bike top end bike that would be a different thing that would be me trying to be a weekend warrior Pro and I want a super nice bike for that I would go for a hill climbing bike particularly if that's what I'm after so I'd look um at some of the very very light frames um that are out there but then you've got to consider your weight too right it's it's one thing getting a really high-end race bike when you say high-end cost bike it's all about weight mainly not so much about speed it really it really depends but I'd say top end bikes go for the main Brands go for the major brands uh don't go out of the ordinary you get the spoke bikes that that profess to have this and that and the other it's not really the case uh it's something I can talk about uh in the future about full monoco frames and there are some bikes coming on the market now that are full monoco frames meaning that none of the B parts of the Box were glued together and you'll see some of these high bikes this is where the price points are going what are your thoughts on the stiffness of frames for a heavier rider for example someone who's 85 to 95 kg this person is in that category and would happily buy a heavier frame versus a lighter frame if he knew that the frame was sort of stiffer and stronger it's a it's a good question because bicycles are generally uh well highend carbon bicycles are generally uh you'll see when you buy a high-end bike there's a kind of a weight limit on the top end and there's a very good reason for that carbon is incredibly stiff but there's a limited which the designers th out those walls to give you a vastly different ride if you were X weight over over another weight you might be surprised to know that carbon bikes are just in terms of a gentle weight on top of them don't know if any of you remember the dogma 65.1 of the 60.5 when they came out in the 2000s nobody knew what that number was that number is the amount of tonnage that can be applied to the frame before it breaks now you say 65 tons you must be joking but you're got to understand that's a gentle weight over the whole frame it's no pointed weight but that is the structural strength at which that frame at that time was able to handle now if you take a a pothole plus speed plus weight plus inertia you're starting to add some big numbers up and they that's you start entering into some some scary so being a bike manufacturer you have to always produce a bike that is robust enough not for the family to take out any legal action on them so you can be rest assured that most bicycles today doesn't matter really how expensive and thin and light they are there's always going to be a certain rule within the manufacturing community of what is safe and what is not safe and they don't put prototype on them for a very good reason because they've tested them to a certain point it's just the technology that's got behind them has got to a point where they can compress press the carbon enough that they can produce a bike of you know the likes of 500 G which is incredible again I say that doesn't mean that the bike is robust enough it just means that structurally it can still handle a certain amount of weight you should ask the question more about what is my seat post the weight at the seat post point and the down tube and the seat tube and how that can handle uh an impact and whether you get any cracking around that area that's something that needs to be investigated a bit more when you come to this and and light frames for heavier Riders so there were a couple of questions about time frames and look frames and if they are really A Cut Above the Rest I can understand what that question was asked because right from the early days and I can't remember where it was time I look but the audience will know there was the weave patent style weaving of the bike it was like a making a sock and they used a a wax insert and that wax insert was then melted out so they could produce the most incredible undercuts and their frames was made them very different and they could develop different styles of structural strength in frames that other frames didn't have with a traditional mold system and the bladder that said there's a huge Evolution across the brands where there's a lot of technology and knowhow that's kind of brought the level closer whereas back then there were some wild ideas you know from from hand winding uh car carbon thread 3K carbon thread around the head tube joints and so on so forth and that made the bik stronger in those areas Argan uh BMC you know very experimental company stalk is another one who invented the way of removing gases from from the uh Matrix which made the walls collapse and get them thinner and that was back in the 2000s with a timer look I've still got that advantage over the other bikes I'm not aware of that I know that um that either one have played around with adding things like Kevlar and color type carbons into their SE tubes for example personally I don't see the point of that because once the carbon breaks and you fall off it's broken you can't save it but I can understand them experimenting with impact issues so from that point of view they've been always very Advanced but whether they're a bet to bike or not is another subject how strong are carbon forks I was thinking about doing an electric conversion and one option was for the front wheel to be converted um I would say if it was if you were asking me this and it was a a metal forks aluminum Forks I'd say you know try but with carbon they specifically designed for specific purposes if you as the owner of that frame who have no part have taken no part in the design and understand this the the parameters around the the failure point of those forks I can say to you quite quite clearly you shouldn't mess with carbon forks for example you wouldn't understand where the intrinsic strength lies in the fork so if you draw the hole to make a mount Point what are you compromising there's this myth about carbon it's a dark art material and so on forth the issue about carbon is that it's built to its Optimum for its purpose so if you don't understand what the purpose was of those forks and what they what they um parameters were then I wouldn't mess with them so Rob how did you get into carbon repair you mean this is about me you want to know about me um well I uh some of you may know I an industrial designer by profession so I got my degree in the early '90s and uh specialized in polymers not so much Composites but polymers and back then carbon wasn't even a thing uh so that wasn't something I I looked into but many many years later it was a side hobby I thought I'd get myself a broken bike and and build it and see what what it took to make a carbon repair and uh through trial and error from doing from hurting myself on Wheels and things realize the limitation of the material but more importantly how that material um really works when you repair something so I learned the hard way um and it was it just grew from there I think I was on a ride once and somebody pulled up next to me and said to me wow that's a really cool bike cuz I had everything Carbon on that bike and just about 90% of the bike was completely repaired it was a trial bike and he said uh uh when I told him I'd repaired this bike that's when it started bicycle shop started contacting me can you help me this is this bikee broken blah blah blah and I didn't know what to charge so kind of really went from there and it just I've been I've been totally amazed really this it's to even turn out into to to be a business um but it is it's a very successful business and it's um and more importantly it's really nice not to waste and throw these bikes away I think we're on over 15,000 bikes that we've done since we started and I think we somebody did some calculation the other day and said we could get to the the bottom of the Mariana trough and up the Burge Khalifa twice just if we put bikes on top of each other that's how much we've saved in in in Saving bicycles um from being scrapped so it's a worthwhile business I'm really glad to be involved in it and uh um all power to repair is there a point in which the lightness of a frame impacts its safety I've said this before and it's a it's a really boring answer but carbon is an evolution it's comp it's always evolving I can promise you that bikes that were made 3 years ago are made slightly differently now so what was 700 g 3 years ago at 700 g now I'm pretty sure it's a safer bike and if it's not that brand won't last long the first most important thing for any brand is their name surviving a very very robust and competitive industry if you're going to produce a bike that's pushing the limits of weight then you're going to have to do your homework and that's why I keep saying the safest light bike that you can buy is one from a major brand because they would have no doubt done their homework that's not to say that the bike is more robust than another it just means it's more fit for purpose and if you were to ask me why you would well I ask you why would you buy a light bike it certainly wouldn't be for time tring and it wouldn't be for going downhills it would be for climbing purely so out of the three things that a bicycle does which is ride on the uphill flats and downhills the light bike only really functions for one particular part of that those three elements in racing the the competition is based on the climbing and if you can win in the climbing that's you can get the biggest differential between the two so it's become a thing that weight is such a big issue for for carbon bikes and we all want a light bike because we think that a that a light carbon bicycle is the best thing to have but I challenge you riding a light light 700 g frame into a headwind you might feel it slightly differently and that's why you find mountain bikes that don't have a weight it's not a big weight thing or time trial bikes in particular if you picked a time trial bike up today you'd be quite surprised how weighty the bike is uh it's very very important to understand that the robustness of a bike for weight which is the original question is the safety comes first and then experimentation comes to that so it's fit for purpose don't clamp that bike on its top tube don't do anything without being very very careful with that bike but as you ride it that bike should be perfect if you damage a carbon bik Beyond repair what is best to do with it I've got a frame that's written off at home but I refuse to take it to the the dump because surely there's someone who will recycle it for me no there the answer you won't be able to recycle it nobody can recycle carbon in that way they can turn it into fodder for Gardens but there's not much nutrition in it um it's a real it's is a real issue once it's once it's formed into a material with with epoxy which is a thermoset which means that the chemical process has then converted itself into a a this material that that doesn't degrade uh it does degrade if you put it into the Sun but it's not something the Earth can use the other part of that is you you say written off I'm not sure what you mean maybe maybe it is generally written off like this bike here if you look at this bike it just looks like a standard um xr4 bian or very nice looking bike this one was written off this one was came to us in a bin bag right and and it was snapped across here completely wrecked and we did it for a YouTuber and uh he hasn't come back to collect it uh but we use this bike um to share with our customers who are concerned about what is written off and what's not written off now of course there's an economic uh reason for you know maybe the bike's not worth repairing cuz it it it costs money to do but there's no such thing as writing carbon off there's certain parts the bike that that we won't fix because we can't test those things to destruction but if on a bike like this which is broken there there and somewhere else I can't remember there's enough portions on this bike for the bike to fail slowly for it not to cause any problems but it won't because it's back to where it was I've been riding two fake Chinese pinell for 10 years fairly fine with them I would like to buy a new bicycle with these market prices why should I think of spending five times more on a name brand bicycle should I buy Chinese again I don't race why not why not I mean if if you asked me this question back then when you bought those bucks 10 years ago I'd say you got lucky now this the standardized carbon frames from China as I've said a few times is is a lot better so you're not taking the risk and yes if you don't race and and you're not a a weekend warrior with badges all over you fine you know why not I don't see the point I don't see see the value in uh driving a Formula 1 car down to the local store you know it doesn't you don't need that you just want to ride you enjoy riding you can ride an alloy bike it doesn't matter um so yeah I I I I would go with that a big thank you to rob from carbon bike repair for answering all your questions and giving us his time you can watch this video next which goes into detail about carbon fiber and specific features on carbon fiber frames lots of good info in that one so hopefully I will see you yeah

Channel: Jourdain Coleman

Views: 82,242

Keywords: carbon fiber road bikes, carbon fiber road bike frame, aluminum vs carbon fiber road bike, How good is carbon fiber, How long do carbon road bikes last, What are the best carbon bikes, What is the best road bike frame material, Asking a carbon expert questions, Carbon fiber bikes, carbon frames, carbon expert, carbon bike repair, carbon bike frame, carbon fiber expert

Id: sfUPznYkiW8

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024