Last ride 76 

Ho, ho.
See my 5/12 post in the C&V section are you looking for on of these? Maybe corner the market even, cause there's also one on eBay.
I've been wrong before...

Kapusta

I am sure that was witty, but it went over my head.

I am much better at making sarcastic comments than understanding them.

alcjphil

It was an excellent sarcastic remark, no question. I very much doubt that my reply went over your neck, much less your head

Reynolds 

It's always fun to watch how CF owners/fans get irritated when CF is referred to as "plastic".

gigadeath

I actually like this one.

cyccommute 

It because people think of cheap plastic toys when someone mentions “plastic”. They have no idea of how the carbon fiber is made...the fiber not the cloth. Monomers are reactedt to form polymers, spun into fiber and then calcined to make graphene. Then a plastic material is used to hold the fibers together. Carbon fiber bicycles frames are “plastic from top to bottom, from birth to death.

Plastic has a very bad connotation in our society but our society would exist without it.

Perhaps ryanbent was “fear-mongering” but carbon fiber bikes are plastic. There’s nothing wrong with calling carbon fiber what it is. It’s not a slight. It’s just the truth.

And there seems to be a lot of work going on to change the type of plastic used to hold the fibers together. That’s only one article on using thermoplastics instead of thermosets for plastics containing carbon fiber. It makes the frame easier to repair and recycle.

The fiberous glass isn’t plastic. The material holding it all together is plastic. Contrast that with carbon fiber where both the matix holding the fiber and the fiber are plastic.

cyccommute 

You do know that carbon fiber is mined nor does it grow on trees (at least not yet). It is a plastic from the acrylonitrile to the polyacrylonitrile to the spun fiber precursor through several steps to the actual fiber to the point where the matrix resin is applied to the cloth. It’s as plastic as that Itera. The only difference between a modern carbon fiber bicycle and that Itera is 40 years of material science in plastics. It’s an ancestor to modern carbon fiber bicycles...kind of the Australopithecus to carbon fiber’s *****apien.

GeneO 

I don't think carbon fibers arre plastic anymore than than charcoal is wood. The polymer stands are transformed into carbon strands.
Carbon fibers don't have the properties of plastics.

Cyclist0108

Complete with hieroglyphics assembly instructions?

There is a word for this: Ikea

Cyclist0108

Whut?

GeneO 

The are polymer strands heated and treated so that all that left is a strand of carbon atoms. The resulting carbon filament does not have the properties of plastic.

Cyclist0108

... or charcoal. The fibers are graphine-like hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms, bound in plastic and bonded together with plastic.

rollagain

Kudos to the folks working on this, and I hope they're getting good results. There may be problems, though. As a kayaker paddling a rotomolded polyethylene boat, I've read plenty of web-posts relating stories of PE boats softening up and oilcanning in the sun. To be fair, none of those boats are made with poly in a fiber matrix. Also, I know there are thermoplastics which are plenty tough and reasonably rigid; polycarbonates (e.g., Lexan) are pretty awesome. Polycarb is pretty heat-resistant, too. So they may well accomplish their objective. In the beginning, though, we can expect such a bike to be priced like jewelry--much as the first CF goodies were. And, as with CF bikes, it may take a few iterations to get it right.

Oneder

Which should cost like 50 cents a pound considering how it's made lol

GeneO 

I didn't say it was charcoal, did I. And I was talking about the fibers themselves, not the composite, wasn't I.

cyccommute 

But charcoal is derived from wood. It still looks like wood and you wouldn’t say that the charcoal never was wood. Paper is made from wood as well. No, it’s no longer wood but is is still wood derived

Your definition of “plastic” is too narrow. Thermoplastics like those used in the Itera can be formed, melted, reformed into the same item, melted, etc. The epoxy used as the matrix for carbon fiber composite is a thermoset plastic. It can be formed and cured. That’s the end of it’s life.

The fiber part of carbon fiber is just an extreme example of a thermoset. The “curing” part is just particularly extreme. The dictionary definition of a plastic is “a synthetic material made from a wide range of organic polymers.” Carbon fiber fits into the category of plastics.

Exactly.

cyccommute 

Actually not. Carbon fiber is hard to make. It requires multiple stages of fairly expensive starting materials and expensive post polymeric treatment. It’s pyrolyzed at almost 1000°C which is no easy feat. The military gobbles up most of the production which drives up the price. And, finally, most of the work in carbon fiber is done is still hand work. It’s difficult to automate so it costs more to build a bicycle frame.

cyccommute 

It’s probably not bicycles that are going to lead when it comes to carbon fiber recycling. The most likely application driving the effort will be wind turbine blades. They are huge and currently landfilled at the end of their lives.

Gresp15C

Amusingly, I used to drive a Saturn. The Saturn salesman was trained to never utter the word "plastic." He told us about how the Saturn body was made of an advanced material called "polymer." It was funny because at the time I worked for a company that made high-tech plastic components.

The engine disintegrated at 60k miles.

Gresp15C

I wonder if, instead of trying to completely separate the CF from the matrix, which would be expensive, they could just chop it up into pieces that can be used for reinforcing something else, like building materials made from recycled plastic.

Camilo

But frighteningly spellbinding. A related topic: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Camilo

Yeah, yeah. But I doubt that people who refer to carbon fiber bike frames and parts as "plastic" have any motivation other than belittling the product. Because they are, or at least seem to be, Luddites who believe bike technology ended in the - I'll give them the late 80s. But really the 50s. There I said it, flame shield on.

But lest you think I'm a carbonfiber-reinforced polymer (or whatever is the approved term) - ophile with a chip on my shoulder, I own bikes of all 4 major materials and love them all and would gladly accept any one of them as my one and only if I had to. Plastic is a stupid, disparaging way of referring to the material, intended to pick a fight, regardless of any claim that it's neutral.

cyccommute 

I think people have tried this but the problem is that carbon fiber works best when the fibers are oriented. If you look at the way that carbon fiber fabric is laid down, they orient the fibers at different angles to get different properties. If the fiber isn't oriented, the matrix has to do the work and the matrix material isn't all that strong. In fact it's rather brittle.

By the way, the orientation of the fabric is the reason that I will argue that carbon fiber won't "shatter into a million pieces". It's a bit like a piece of wood in actuality. A break in the fiber has to cross several different orientations of the fabric and that keeps cracks from propagating rapidly. Catastrophic breaks happen at the joints. But that's where breaks in metal frames tend to happen also.

cyccommute 

I didn't take his comment (completely) that way. I'll agree that the term "plastic" has some negative connotations in some circles. But talk to any chemist, engineer, or material scientist and the term "plastic" doesn't mean something bad. Our modern lives would be impossible without plastics. Your life is touched every day by "plastic"...hell, I'm touching plastic to type this and I'm depending on plastic to convert that touch to electrons and I'm depending on plastic to send those electrons to your screen and you are, yada, yada, yada. If we tried to use metal for all the things we use plastic for, our lives would take more effort (iron tires would be impossibly heavy), cost much more and be much more dangerous. Without plastic, we wouldn't have insulation on wiring and would risk electrocution constantly.

I don't accept that the term "plastic" is "stupid, disparaging...[or used to] to pick a fight". If you want to take it that way, that's your prerogative but I look on plastics as wonderful materials that can be used in a huge variety of ways. I don't have any carbon fiber bicycle but I have a number of carbon fiber parts (forks, handlebars, seat posts, derailer parts, water bottle cages, etc.) on bikes I have no more issues with them than I do the aluminum parts and bicycles I have. Remember, some people disparage aluminum as well and say that it will "explode into a thousand pieces at the slightest impact".

grizzly59