Matt_
I Get Jokes
Long story short, my entire family rides, races, and crashes a lot. Last season my oldest daughter cracked her seat stay, but she was due for a new race bike anyway so I built her a procaliber SL and set aside the other procaliber to fix and then build for my other daughter who will be moving up a frame size by this spring.
Rather than pay to have it fixed, I figured this would be a good skill to learn as I may have to do this periodically as everyone is only getting better and riding ever more challenging terrain.
For well south of $80 I purchased enough carbon, epoxy, and shrink release tape to do quite a few repairs.
There are definitely a few lessons learned.... So I'll get to them first:
- Don't rush after mixing the epoxy. If I waited a few minutes for it to start getting tacky it would have been easier from the start.
- PRE-CUT the shrink tape and stage it ready to wrap. That stuff is slippery and I had 5 yards of it trying to unravel.
- Already knew this, but wrap the shrink tape in the direction you wrapped the carbon.
- Add and extra layer or three of carbon to the damaged area, it does shrink down quite a bit and can always be sanded smooth.
- Next time I'll probably have the last layer wrap almost a full two revolutions
- I took some advice and over shrink-wrapped the bike, but didn't know why. Now I do, when you hit the repair with the heat gun the epoxy gets squeezed out and blown all over the place. Lower fan speed will help.
- Read epoxy instructions carefully. Mine recommended 75 deg F, hence I'm inside near the fireplace.
Ok now that no one read that and scrolled to the pics....
Damaged area sanded:
Wrapped!
Did the typical template method with paper first. From the research I did, the less you handle the carbon the better since it likes to fall apart.
I thought I'd be smart and use painters tape (kind of like the wax for stickers) to keep the carbon weave together until putting them on the repair. Don't do this, it doesn't work.
Set your OCD aside. The patches are going to fray... Just needed to cut them a little larger than required and move on with life.
Limited to 10 pics so I'll end with this one, my epoxy was 1:1 ratio... Had an idea to use a little medicine cup and it worked like a charm. This little bit also ended up being way more than I needed.
Rather than pay to have it fixed, I figured this would be a good skill to learn as I may have to do this periodically as everyone is only getting better and riding ever more challenging terrain.
For well south of $80 I purchased enough carbon, epoxy, and shrink release tape to do quite a few repairs.
There are definitely a few lessons learned.... So I'll get to them first:
- Don't rush after mixing the epoxy. If I waited a few minutes for it to start getting tacky it would have been easier from the start.
- PRE-CUT the shrink tape and stage it ready to wrap. That stuff is slippery and I had 5 yards of it trying to unravel.
- Already knew this, but wrap the shrink tape in the direction you wrapped the carbon.
- Add and extra layer or three of carbon to the damaged area, it does shrink down quite a bit and can always be sanded smooth.
- Next time I'll probably have the last layer wrap almost a full two revolutions
- I took some advice and over shrink-wrapped the bike, but didn't know why. Now I do, when you hit the repair with the heat gun the epoxy gets squeezed out and blown all over the place. Lower fan speed will help.
- Read epoxy instructions carefully. Mine recommended 75 deg F, hence I'm inside near the fireplace.
Ok now that no one read that and scrolled to the pics....
Damaged area sanded:
Wrapped!
Did the typical template method with paper first. From the research I did, the less you handle the carbon the better since it likes to fall apart.
I thought I'd be smart and use painters tape (kind of like the wax for stickers) to keep the carbon weave together until putting them on the repair. Don't do this, it doesn't work.
Set your OCD aside. The patches are going to fray... Just needed to cut them a little larger than required and move on with life.
Limited to 10 pics so I'll end with this one, my epoxy was 1:1 ratio... Had an idea to use a little medicine cup and it worked like a charm. This little bit also ended up being way more than I needed.
