noglider 

Good story, @Steve Whitlach. I'm not looking for a carbon frame, but I know one of these days, a deal too good to refuse will come up, and I will grab it. And I will enjoy it.

unterhausen

okay, we don't need to see the pic of the guy impaled with the piece of the track, please don't post it any more.

RiddleOfSteel

I am glad you're enjoying carbon. I do as well! My Ridley Damocles (such a great name) is also incredibly smooth--carbon's ability to absorb vibrations is one of its strong suits as we know--yet playful and responsive. The Damocles does nothing wrong, yet since it is not steel or high-performance aluminum (a la Trek Emonda ALR), it lacks that springy-ness inherent to metal. I want to try newer than 2010 carbon (and such not solely built for the pounding Classics cobble rides as the Damocles is) to see how it fares, though hard to justify in a way when a Land Shark absorbs bumps at near-carbon levels while also feeling springy in the climbs and accelerations out of saddle. The Damocles feels truly bomb-proof and dead stable in all scenarios. And with a frameset 200-300g more than the fly-weight carbon stuff, that certainly makes sense.

shoota 

The video from the TdF car shows pretty clearly that the Ineos car ran over the bike and split it in half. The bike was 100% intact before the team car rolls over it. So take that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhC081Llaao&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0__KykLiK2nC4pKj7aVK4yDM3Qt9RRDCS0KhUHZ6gRkOKfJd8O40 KaHTA

crank_addict

I don't know the facts of the OP but regardless, wouldn't stop me from riding a pick of pro caliber road bikes.

Indeed those road frames are ridden by brute riders but the forces and impacts that very light carbon ATB bike frames can take are impressive.

In 1990, I was already beating up an off-road Kestrel CS-X monocoque 26 inch hardtail including carbon flat bar by Aerosport. I assure you, was doing dumb and bold things with that bike. Never, ever had a frame issue.

Today, I have lots of confidence in a modern 29er hardtail, a far lighter carbon monocoque frame but in a complete different lay up. Admit I've bashed and bruised twice on it, the frame though- unscathed.

eja_ bottecchia

You can hear the frame snap as the car runs over it.

conspiratemus1

Thanks for that. The half-second of the video that shows the bike on the ground, intact, post-crash, is the most important contribution to this whole thread. Throws all the pseudo-engineering mumbo-jumbo out the window. (I'm not saying that statements about the properties of carbon-fibre-matrix structures are not correct. I'm just saying that they don't explain the failure of this structure.)

If most of us had seen a photo of any old bike snapped in two, like the photo at the top of the thread, we would have asked, "What happened to that bike? A car run over it?" And sure enough, just as common sense would tell us, the answer was, "Yup!" But for some reason, the default "explanation" when it's a CF bike is, "It must have as-ploded JRA!"

A couple of decades ago, there was an urban legend going around that people could spontaneously combust into ashes. Earnest investigative TV news shows (I think there is an oxymoron in there somewhere) covered the phenomenon with some persistence, showing as "evidence" some obviously faked and staged photos. (This was before PhotoShop.) Oh, and eye-witness accounts, like the ones describing alien abductions. I remember one photo of a small pile of ashes over a burned hole in a hardwood floor, straddling which was an aluminum-framed walker. The elderly victim, using his walker, was said to have gone up in smoke, "just like that." There was no soot (or charred bits of the dear departed) on the walker tubes and the rubber feet, despite standing in contact with the burned floor, were intact. Weirdly, the obvious absurdity of the photos seemed to buttress, rather than debunk, the spontaneous combustion theory. I guess if you have a preposterous lie to spread, the best agent is preposterous evidence. Aside from the understandable motives like insurance fraud or covering up a homicide, it was never clear what drove this whole meme (as I think we would call it today, but there was no Internet then). People just like to believe goofy, bizarre things that seem to prove that "Science can't explain everything, you know..." And feelings trump words which trump numbers. (Please, mods, note the lower-case "t", OK?)

We (and I include myself here, which is why I find @shoota's post so bracing) are too slow to include, "Well, s/he (or it, in the case of a photo) could be lying, you know," as one of the possible explanations for something that doesn't quite make sense but would so totally validate our world view if it were true. If only.

FBOATSB

I concur. All I want to hear is the TDF commentators shouting breathlessly "Rider down! Rider down! His frame has assploded!"
Then I will know they are BF members.

Mr. Spadoni 

Thanks for clearing that up. The VN article ....
https://www.velonews.com/2019/07/new...o-pinot_496996.

Made no no mention of the car. In total, it says this about the crash.....

“Canadian rider Michael Woods (EF Education First) slid out in a tight right-hand corner, and Thomas crashed over him. Thomas’s Ineos teammate Gianni Moscon (Ineos) crashed as well, snapping his carbon Pinarello bike frame in half.”

It would seem that the article’s author left out a key factor in the frame failure. Application of a load of a few thousand pounds in a manner not anticipated by designers and engineers, even in the extreme scenarios that they are expected to account for, should not reflect on the quality of the frame or the choice of materials. In other words, most things will break when run over by a car.

That said, it is about time to go for a ride so I won’t read any more TDF coverage. I needed that saddle based perspective to try to remain thoughtful.

shoota 

Yeah, unfortunate reporting. You can see in the pic they posted in the article that both bikes were whole. I'm sure it was just a mistake. Enjoy your ride, today's stage was incredible!

steelbikeguy

but there are rumors that you enjoy taunting the Grim Reaper and ride a Teledyne titanium frame with the original fork!

of course, you're not a heavy person and probably not putting a ton of miles on that potentially delicate fork, so the risks are not so great.

Similarly(?), modern CF frames are engineered better than the early ones and if you are reasonable, the risks are quite small. I've put over 20k miles on a CF recumbent and it has survived as well as my steel frame bikes. This is just anecdotal evidence, as is most of what has been mentioned in this thread, so it mostly just means that the lethality of CF frames is below 100%.

There is a fellow on youtube who started as life working with CF in the aviation industry and is now using those skills looking for potential damage in CF bike frames and doing some repairs, if I recall correctly. He does a bit of destructive analysis now and then, by cutting damaged frames in half and looking at the quality of the construction. Very interesting and informative!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY9...4lLOHpb_zbIedQ

Steve in Peoria

old's'cool

And your hypothesis for why they're "going slow" is?

horatio 

Gonna ride dangerously today... on my carbon Cannondale!

shoota 

You're a wildman!

Steve Whitlatch 

Probably because they are not interested in going fast? I ride my steel bikes hard too. I like going fast. My fast is not as fast as other peoples fast. My point is more that the Carbon Bikes are out in mass, being pushed hard, and not killing the riders on a daily basis. If they were really dangerous, I think I would have witnessed a catastrophy by now?

since6

Oh, for those who would like to try the wicked world of carbon fiber, this $4,000.00 in 2012 bike is currently up for auction at $14.00 with no bids on Goodwill, Dura Ace and wicked cool rear brake placement.

It's kind of crazy what people give away.

Marcus_Ti

"Wicked cool brake placement" in this case meaning it will get clogged with road grime, and will have all lubricant/grease washed out of bearings/bushings in one wet ride.

old's'cool

Yeah, I'll buy that!

tony c

so cool

Bandera

Yet another C&V gloating Schadenfreude post regarding modern hardware that is, as usual, simply Wrong.
Pretending that the current generation of machines in service are somehow failure prone, fragile and unsuited to the use for which they are designed is sour grapes and silly at best.
Enjoy your now obsolete bikes for what they were/are. It's not 1969 anymore, fortunately.

-Bandera

squirtdad

just for fun the Ny times take on this

FWIW.... I like steel and can't see carbon in my future I don't hate carbon, but it is a fact that when it fails it fails fast. Biggest issue is people not understanding the design limits of a super light racing frame (which are considered a consumable item by racing teams vs a possible life time frame for most users. I have no doubt that a carbon frame engineered to be a fast daily rider can last a good amount of time, with proper care.

and threadless stems are for the most part fugly

get off my lawn


https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/s...JAuLrZ8-Fwl994