http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_A-KuFVhr0
holy shit
[quote=white folks]
holy shit[/quote]
WTF, that looks like a decently hard crash, but for that bike to assplode like that is BS.
That shit is ridiculously strong throughout the beam. The way they designed it looks like garbage in the joints though. Shit that is really a small amount of surface area to put all that stress between the head tube and the top tube on. As far as the tubing goes, It’s a legit design.
Tensile strength is inherently better than just about anything. Impact resistance is usually not so great unless specifically engineered for that purpose that’s why you see a lot of broken carbon bits after a wreck with impact, which is most of what’s on that site. A little bit of kevlar in the lay up goes a long way, some folks design for impact protection with carbon. By “some folks” I really mean Santa Cruz Bikes. They mentioned having ~.500" layup on the bottom of the downtube of the new V10 carbon. I imagine that’d be difficult to break. Also, as a point of reference, here’s a bit of carbon that’s been designed with impact protection in mind:
[/quote]
I’ve seen that video a few times (I think you’ve posted it before) and I love it.
I’m really stoked on the Santa Cruz carbon bikes. It’s exciting to see them finally jump into carbon fiber, since they wouldn’t fuck with it unless it was STRONG. I can’t wait for the carbon Chameleon, even though they have no plans to make a carbon Chameleon as far as I know.[/quote]
Just to play devil’s advocate.
Carbon fork - “We don’t recommend riding the fork after this much damage.” And you can’t actually see any type of injury aside from paint chips.
Steel fork - While they don’t actually say it, I’m sure it’s been significantly weakened also.
So the steel fork looks a lot worse, they haven’t necessarily proven that the carbon fork is stronger than the steel. And with the steel, you get the benefit of knowing that damage has been done.
I’m not a fiberphobe by any means, but I still felt like this was worth mentioning.
What they have proven though, is that the damage to the steel fork will be visible.
We’ve had this discussion before.
Carbon can be made stronger and tougher than steel. Most of the time (with bike parts), it’s not made to be tougher. That, and the failure characteristics aren’t as gradual.
In the case of the Niner fork and the Santa Cruz V10 carbon, it is made to be tougher. I’d ride the shit out of either of those bits. Think about the steel, you can generally just look at it and assess the damage. With carbon, that’s not the case so much.
Your last sentence is the point that I was trying to make.
Anything can be built stronger that anything else if you do it correctly, which I know that you know. My point was that the video guy was basically admitting that there was invisible damage to the carbon fork, versus the visible damage to the steel fork.
It isn’t totally hammerproof, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. Nothing should need to be.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume there was invisible damage to the carbon fork. The point is, one has to be agnostic, because without an x-ray, it’s a guessing game. I’d probably continue to ride that fork in that condition.
I’m just going off of what he said in the video.
Here’s what he said, word for word.
“As you can see, there are chips in the paint from the impact, but you can see the carbon layers haven’t been punctured or cracked. While we don’t recommend riding the fork after this much damage, you can see that the fork doesn’t catastrophically fail.”
So at least in lawyer speak, that fork is unsafe to ride, even without any visible damage aside from the paint chips.
The steel fork, which would also be unsafe to ride, at least shows its damage.
Once again, I’m not taking a dump on carbon. Just pointing something out.
Reading the last few posts, I think that we’re kind of talking about two different things and not actually disagreeing on anything.
This. I have a bad habit of arguing with people that I agree with.
I think that’s actually lawyer-speak for:
“If you hit your fork repeatedly with a hammer and it fails for any reason, that shit IS NOT covered by warranty, dumbass.”
just gonna go out on a limb and throw this ol heezy up as one of my favourite parrotty threads of recentime