The Composite Frame on a Bicycle

Video Transcript

Charles McMahon for Expert Village. We are talking about the bicycle. You can get more information from my college level textbook on merionmedia.com. The latest and greatest thing in bicycle frames is the composite frame and you can make a whole complete frame out of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer composite they call it CFRP. Now the tubes and components that you make out of CFRP are very light, you know because you are using light materials as opposed to metals, even aluminium, they are very light, they are very stiff, you can tailor the stiffness just by adjusting the amount of fiber, carbon fiber in the tube and you can put it together by bonding. So it sounds like the world’s greatest material. However, there are a couple of things that you have remember, these are very, very hard and they are brittle, they are not like metals, if you have a ding somewhere in the metal frame a little stress concentrated because of the ding, it is not going to crack because metals are tough generally. A CFRP material is not tough, it is glass brittle, so it’s very unforgiving when it comes to damage. Now for the frame part in a triangle frame this is not such a big deal, if you get a ding, if it is a big ding, you can’t repair it, alright, putting some glue in there really does not make it like new again. However, the stresses in the frame are not that big a deal and if you crack one of these tubes it is not the end of the world. However, you can get CFRP Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic forks. Now you can see that the fork is held up here in the head tube, alright, and the next connection is down at the hub, now if you were riding along and let us say you had a ding, some defects, some things from stones or whatever that have made little defects in the front of your fork and you run into a curb, you can snap the whole fork right off, it wont bend like a metal fork, it will snap and I have seen several of these things that have snapped and of course when it snaps the rider gets thrown over in front of the bike and he could get injured. So although you can save some weight and pay some extra money by having a carbon steel fork. I would recommend against even if you have a Carbon Fiber Reinforced frame I would get a metal fork or aluminium fork, you know save much weight and you are a lot safer and the issue here is the inherent glass like brittleness of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics.

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