Originally Posted by
rydabent
I have seen and touched a couple of Wright Bros steel bikes. they are now around 120 years old. Put a set of tires on it and off you would go. Do you honestly think that you could do that in 120 years with a CF bike built today. I say it would be so brittle it would shatter in a thousand pieces when someone tried to get on.
I offer this analogy. I help friends work on old cars. The plastic electrical plug are extremely brittle and prone to breakage. Remember the lions part of the weight in a CF bike is plastic.
Those wright brother bikes are probably pretty rusted out on the inside. I wouldn't ride them. Because if we take the nonsensical hyperbolic approach you've been going with I can imagine all kinds of reasons why no frame material is sufficient for bicycle use.
Take steel for example. Steel rusts. And while aluminum oxidizes as well, especially in the presence of chlorine atoms, steel just rust so much worse. When you combine chlorine with aluminum the chlorine atom does its thing oxidizing the aluminum atoms and then it kinda stops. Thus you need more salt for more corrosion. However with steel the chlorine atom doesn't stop. It jumps to the next atom and the next after that causing a chain reaction rusting the steel which eventually rusts the whole frame apart. And you cannot avoid it. Chlorine is everywhere but especially in salt which is found in sweat. So you sweat on your steel bike once and it's gone. Eventually.
Aluminum on the other hand doesn't have a fatigue limit. So you ride it and eventually it will fall apart. There's no avoiding it. An aluminum frame will fail eventually when it's ridden. That's a fact. So don't be so dumb as to ride an aluminum frame.
Titanium can only be welded in vaccuum. So if your frame does break it's pretty much toast.
Wood might be the way to go. But then there's worms and other pests which eat wood. And mold. You cannot win.
But if we consider plastics, there is in fact more than one. And different plastics have different properties. Not all plastics are UV-sensitive. Nylon is. Polyester not so much. Which is weird because most quality tents are made out of nylon... I wonder why that is? Could it have something to do with UV-protective coatings?
So to assume a carbon frame will suffer from UV-light we must first assume that the epoxy used to form the frame is very UV-sensitive. That's not a given though. But if the epoxy is UV-sensitive, it then needs to be uncoated for the UV-rays to get through. If the frame is painted, well then there's no issue is there? Paint can be reapplied if it chips.
As to the concept of "gassing off", there aren't that many plastics that actually do that. Plastic's stability is actually a major environmental issue. They just won't degrade. But I suppose that can happen with some volatile plastics like those that were made in the early days of plastic. The kind you see in old cars. But to my knowledge the epoxies used in carbon fiber production don't vaporize and are actually very stable even in low pressure environments, like airplane for example. Did you know all modern fighter jet wings and chassis are made out of carbon fiber? Well now you know. And a fighter jet has a service life of more than 40 years or so of far heavier use than a bicycle will ever see.
Now if you do respond to this post, feel free to ignore all of the stuff written above. Just respond to this. If you don't I'll know you're trolling and full of it.
Have you ever seen sailboats? What are they made of? Could it be glass fiber? The stuff that is also bound by an epoxy matrix, ie. plastic. Now do sail boats see much sunlight and therefore UV-light? Do sailboats experience demanding conditions?
The sailboat my inlaws own was made in the early 70's. By your logic since it's almost 50 years old it should have disintegrated by now or at least it should be unusable because of the various methods of plastic degradation. It looks like new.