I have broken two frames on tour. The breaks and circumstances are as follows.
The first break happened in 2001 near Shark Bay in Western Australia. A little hard to see but that line you see is a crack that goes ~2/3 of the way around the left chainstay.
This is on my aluminum framed Cannondale T1000 touring bicycle. The sequence that led to this started some 1800km before this point:
- About 260km before coming to Broome, WA; I noticed my rear wheel was starting to develop cracks from the eyeholes for the spokes.
- Better safe than sorry, when I got to Broome, I went to the bicycle shop and inquired whether they could pre-emptively replace the wheel. Broome is 2000+ km north of Perth and it is not very populated so rather replace when I could
- The bike shop didn't have materials to rebuild a wheel; so they called down to Perth and had a bike shop there build up a new wheel and send it out by truck. It took two days per truck transport and a day or two to get scheduled so I spent most of the week waiting.
- Once the wheel arrived, the bike shop it turned out the spacing was too wide and they forced open the dropouts to squeeze in the wheel. This also put the tire closer to the left dropout. We determined this later. I wasn't watching them in detail because I was busy taking apart the old wheel to get the hub to send home.
- About 1500km later, when I got to Shark Bay, I noticed the rather ominous crack. Shark Bay is still 280km away from the nearest town with a bike shop (Geraldton).
- Without anything else to do, I put duct tape around the chainstay and started down the road. Figured if it failed, I would stand beside the road to hitchhike or catch a bus.
- It took three and a half days of cycling, but fortunately the duct tape held and got myself to Geraldton. Here I found a bike shop and they did the analysis to determine what happened including the width being too wide.
At this point, I had to figure out what to do with the broken frame. Geraldton still isn't Perth and it didn't seem like there was much in way of local options. I called Cannondale contact numbers and it was close to model switchover and they couldn't find a frame in my size in all of Australia. I probably could have gone to Perth to find a replacement bike, but instead I had a different Cannondale T600 bike back in the US. Cost of shipping that bike was surprisingly high and for approximately 1.5x of the shipping costs, I could fly over and come back with the bike. So I took the bust from Geraldton, flew back from Perth to SFO, stayed five days to get my lower fare and flew back to Perth. I then cycled from Perth back to Geraldton. Here the bike shop moved bike racks and other components from old bike to new bike. After that I continued the trip. I was fortunate with my timing in all this because my flight back from SFO landed in Perth on August 30th, 2001. If I'd been two weeks later, I would have been caught up in flight issues following 9/11 as well as collapse of local carrier Ansett Airlines which happened later.
The second broken frame was in 2017 on my Trek 4500 mountain bike. The photo below shows the right chainstay after a welding repair.
The circumstances surrounding this failure.
- I was cycling from Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia - starting June 2016.. In August 2016, I switched from my touring bike to this mountain bike, in part to try some GDMBR.
- This failure happened in October 2017, so had ridden for more than a year and many kilometers before the frame failed. It was all fairly loaded with both my weight and my gear.
- I didn't notice the failure initially. Instead, I was taking some language classes in Bariloche, so brought my bike in for service. They brought it to my attention.
- I asked for their advice and they suggested they could weld the frame. So I had them do this and above is the photo post repair.
- I was still a little iffy on how well this might last. However, I had only the part from Bariloche to Puerto Montt to still cycle loaded - and after that I would join a supported TDA ride from Puerto Montt to Ushuaia.
- So figured I would give things a try and if the bike failed, quickly fly back to the US to retrieve an alternate bicycle to complete my journey.
- The weld held fine, both to Puerto Montt and then the remainder of the way to Ushuaia. I still have the bike, but now it is one of my commuting bikes and won't take it on tour.