Carbon is here to stay! From the Ibis site: www.ibiscycles.com Carbon Fiber and Durability Carbon fiber has both phenomenal strength and superior fatigue resistance when compared to other commonly used frame materials. And as it is with other materials, a crash can wreak havoc on your nice carbon frame. How much do you have to worry about the durability of carbon fiber after a crash? As you might imagine, depends on the crash. First of all, carbon fiber mountain bikes are not new phenomena. Trek and Giant have had carbon fiber mountain bikes in the field for more than 5 years without a significant history of problems. BCD has been making their bomber downhill carbon frames since 1996. If you crash any bike hard enough, you?re going to need to repair it or replace it. Before we talk about repairing carbon bikes though, we?ll tell you a little bit about what we do to the frames so that maybe you won?t need to get it repaired. On our bikes, the areas that are most prone to damage are reinforced accordingly. The last couple of layers are engineered to be very resistant to impact. Most of the layup of our carbon frames finds the carbon prepreg in 0?, 22.5? and 45? orientations. The 90? weave you often see as the top layer provides the best resistance to impact. We also add a layer of e glass in impact prone areas that need additional toughness. In all but the most heinous of hucks, it's the resin matrix that fails, not the carbon weave. So the less resin in your layup, the less likely you will see crack propagation. The newer lower resin composites used today are less likely to chip, crack or fail catastrophically. Reduce the resin required to 'wet-out' the matrix and you reduce the risk of failure. See our carbon tech piece for more info. But let?s say you run out of talent in a big way, and crush some fiber along with your own bones. The good news is carbon can be repaired. You might not believe this, but often it is easier and less expensive to repair than Aluminum, Ti or Steel. An impact that severely dents an aluminum tube might need a tube replaced. Aluminum bikes are heat treated, so in addition removing and replacing the old tube (if it can be removed), you need to also heat treat, realign and repaint or reanodize the frame. None of this is necessary with a carbon frame. Our friend Craig Calfee offers carbon fiber repair. And probably some other carbon manufacturers do too. Craig is currently working on an article on the repairability of carbon, and is also going to add a non-Calfee repair page to his site. In the mean time, you can go over to his site here: http://www.calfeedesign.com/pages/ship_frame_to_calfee.php
