cyclintom

We just had a long bitter argument about how unsafe carbon fiber bikes are.

I have since talked to an industry insider and he told me that carbon fiber frames can be make as strong and long lasting as steel frames. But, he said, then these frames would weigh about the same as steel frames. And the demand is for ultra-lights. He thinks that eventually the majority of companies will be sued out of business because the industry knows that these ultra-lights are dangerous to the point of serious injuries or even death. He thinks that it is only a matter of time before we start getting a large number of failures.

In any case, be that as it may, I have a Colnago Dream HP. This has an aluminum main triangle, a carbon fork and the rear triangle is stolen directly from the C50. Ready for the road with a seatpack on it it weights in at 22.4 lbs.

I am in the process of building up a very good steel frame. I transferred all of the parts from my broken C40 to it. Presently the only thing I'm missing is the control cables, bar tape and seatpack. I put it on the scale yesterday and it weighs 22.11 lbs. And it has heavy Campy Atlanta wheels on it.

Now the C40 was two lbs lighter but you have to remember that I had a non-catastrophic failure of a fork that caused me to crash at high speed. And my friend had a catastrophic failure of his C40 for no reason at all luckily while he was on a bike path going about 5 mph. He got away with a severely broken small finger that will never regain full motion. And in 15 more minutes he would have been on a 40 mph descent.

For those that absolutely MUST have ultra-lights you can now buy top of the line titanium frames for half the price of the top of the line carbon frames. There is still the problem of the carbon forks but at that price savings you can replace the fork every two years and feel perfectly safe.

So there really is no reason to take chances with your life on a full carbon bike.

The problem is that people invest a lot of confidence in their own judgement and tend to pay no attention whatsoever to facts and statistics. So I don't expect many if any to pay any attention to this post.

memebag

Everything is real, man. Like, even unreal things are real. It's trippy.

badger1

Not this poor, tired, cloth-eared, moth-eaten pantomime dead horse again, surely?

Make ... It ... Stop.

indyfabz

Whoa! You just blew my mind, dude.


Have a feeling one bucket won't be enough.

rmfnla

I'm too fredly to consider anything other than steel...

indyfabz

Heh. Yeah. These thread usually aren't even mildly entertaining. For entertainment, check out the thread about Fred trying to drop some guy on an MUP.

badger1

... but it's fun to play! So, re. in bold above: incorrect. The reason most of us won't pay any (further, in my case) attention to your post, as was the case with your previous thread, is that it is a pile of nonsense.

That is all.

Seattle Forrest

As long as there's somebody in the world who thinks that, it must be true. We'll call it the bikepocalypse.

badger1

Oh I have; I've even proffered you congratulations! A classic in terms both of its entertainment value and your serious point -- the two are not at all unrelated.

Seattle Forrest

Wait a minute, I just talked to a schizophrenic who says steel bikes are going to turn against their owners one day, it's only a matter of time before millions of people are murdered. We just agreed that any crazy thing a person believes is true so that rules out carbon and steel bikes. Guess we all need bamboo, huh?

bulldog1935

plastic resin - no it cannot be made to last as long as steel (in a landfill yes, but not in a mechanical application)

Dave Cutter

Or maybe Elon Musk is right.... and all of this is only a simulation. After all hasn't it been determined that neutrons are all merely swirling energy vortexes.... with no actual mass.

Ultra-light is always barely stable enough to be useful.... it doesn't matter whether it is steel or plastic.

indyfabz

I talked to him after you did. He's already changed his mind.

Wilfred Laurier

Ah! The same 'industry insider' whose words you misrepresented to make the same point two weeks ago?
https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/1073471-danger-carbon-fiber-bikes.html

Give up. You are a liar and a loser.

cyclintom

Didn't you just say you weren't going to pay any further attention to this string? That it was all a bunch of nunsense since it offered real statistics?

Or is your attention span so short you don't even remember saying that you weren't going to post any longer?

jefnvk

The fact that you still are caring about the weight of your bike down to the hundredth of a pound and justifying the difference in three tenths of a pound between two metal bikes shows exactly why CF bikes and ultralightness in general is very much here to stay.

All my bikes are steel. One is around 24-25#, one is in the 30# range, the other two are 33-34#ish. I arguably have more fun on the 34#ish pound Schwinn than I do on the 24 and some change pound Peugeot. So really, you don't even have to risk your life on lightweight steel bikes, just go for the all out, fully lugged, hi-ten steel beasts. I ran mine into a chainlink fence the other day. Stuck the front wheel between my legs, manhandled the handlebars back into roughly the right place (been on two rides since, they aren't straight, but I keep forgetting/can't be bothered to fix it), and continued on. Couldn't do that with a lightweight wheel set!

PolarBear007

In on p1

PhotoJoe 

Still on page one and already off the tracks. Closing this before it goes any further.