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There's No Good Reason to Buy a Carbon Bike
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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I did not expect this article to recommend steel bikes as alternatives. I fully expected to read aluminium especially with the advanced tube types available now.
Also, although the aerodynamic benefits of carbon are difficult for amateurs to truly appreciate, the weight advantage that carbon bikes or even carbon parts offer, can't be ignored. Even replacing the front fork with a carbon fork would remove a lot of unwanted weight that you'd feel even on the first run!
Yeah weight is the best advantage for carbon imo. Of course when you're riding it's a marginal performance gain nobody really needs nor want. But when you're not it's a massive difference. Try going up a tight spiral staircase to reach you front door with a 25lbs roadie. Now do that twice a day to commute to work and suddenly the steel part really, really sucks. Even more recent options are still 50% heavier not to mention as expensive as some cheaper CF options, not all of them are 10k. Aluminium is really the only good alternative as far as I'm concerned.
And they also think looks is a valid argument.
Less people steal steel than carbon, I'd assume.
Does carbon have the same longevity and load characteristics as steel?
Those are value judgements. How does a carbon bike get stolen if it's never locked in a public place? Why would a carbon bike be loaded with anything more than a bottle of water and a small saddle bag?
These considerations are important for commuting, touring, and other fun activities, but are perhaps less important for the bike racer.
You’re in the “fuckcars” community. Bikes are part of non-car transportation. How do you use a bike as an primary or secondary form of transportation if you never park in a public place or carry anything more than a bottle of water and a small saddle bag?
I've had many coworkers roll into the office with their carbon bikes because it makes quick work of a long commute and it's so easy to carry a lightweight machine up the office stairs. They'd wear a backpack if they needed to carry a laptop. No cars involved; not even a bus.
There's no need to gatekeep which kind of bike someone chooses to use when the objective is to not drive a car. They can ride a carbon bike if they want too.
Not every bike needs to be for transport. Also, I've brought my carbon bike in my office at more than one job. My commute was already 1 hour each way with a nice road bike. My hybrid might be nice for running errands, but there's no way I'd have made the trip to work with that. Now I have an ebike that makes it even easier to do the trip to work (doesn't save much time except when there's a headwind, but I don't get as sweaty). But if I didn't live on the ground floor, there's no way I'd be able to deal with getting that up and down stairs every day.
Somewhere like the Netherlands, every bike racer is going to have at least two bikes: a regular commuting 'granny bike', and a racing roadbike.
Just as it's common for a runner to have regular-ass shoes for going grocery shopping and a pair of running shoes they only really use when training for a marathon, or for reasonably well-off car/ motorcycle enthusiasts to have a more practical regular car they use for daily driving and a less practical sporty vehicle for pleasure drives.
Road bikes like you see in the Tour de France aren't really a practical form of transportation. You have special shoes that clip to the pedals, you wear lycra bike shorts, etc.
No. Carbon is more elastic but when it fails it fails completely. With metal frames they get a dent which you can easily repair.
Carbon's elasticity limit is far beyond what steel's plastic deformation point is though. That means a carbon frame will still be structurally sound as a bike frame after being through an impact that would bend a steel frame to be unusable. Steel is tough, carbon is strong.
Of course there is some impacts that will shatter it but a metal frame would've bent beyond any repairs from the same impact in 100% of the cases.
Moot point in reality, as unfortunately any deep gouges or signs of delamination are genuine cause for replacement of a CF part. The gouges are strong stress risers and cannot be ignored.
I agree that the damage can't be ignored when it happens but that's not my point at all. I'm just saying that the force needed to inflict this damage would have destroyed a metal frame to a greater extent rendering it immediately useless. That is also part of why carbon parts are so light. You need much less material to achieve similar strength.
Here's an example of the difference between a carbon and aluminium MTB frame of the same bike model. Again, I'm not saying these frames are undamaged, I'm just pointing at how much more repeated and specifically applied force is needed to damage them when talking about two parts used for the same application.
edit:fixed the link
I unfortunately can't agree with that sentiment. Composites fail in very complex ways, with part of a tested sample failing in tension, another portion in compression and a third portion of that same sample in torque (possibly other ways too, depending on layup etc).
To bolster my point, listen to the video you've linked. Long before the steel has started obviously yielding, you can hear some of the CF fibers failing. It'll take it, but your rated static strength is actually decreasing as those fibers in the downtube cross-section progressively fail. When failure in that video finally happens, it's indeed at a high value... But it was only tested to failure once. And therein lies the insidiousness.
You've taken a jump on your mtb several times, jump, jump, jump, not hearing the gentle pinging in your bike's headset area every time you land. One day you take the jump, as usual, but the headset and thus the forks & handlebars snap off. That's a problem.
I totally agree with everything you are saying. But you have to consider the application of said material. A bike frame that bends is a failed part and it does not matter how much more force it can resist, it is now useless. I also am speaking of catastrophic failure by the way, as in there is no bike anymore after this crash type of incident. In these cases, I believe the carbon bike will endure a greater amount of force than a steel bike. And that's also while being far lighter because at equal weight there is really no contest.
Well at this point we're talking fundamental properties, yeah, CF is stronger in tension than steel or aluminum, for less weight.
I guess the crux of my argument is that details like layup and such are critically important, mainly cuz the applied force cannot accidentally be permitted to focus on a small area and break the fibers there, repeat repeat repeat, progressively destroying that part.
At least metals are generally consistent in their properties in multiple directions. I'd need a lot of reassurance, technically, before I flew on anything with a fully carbon wing, particularly as the wing ages.
I understand that it does not do well beyond it's yield point. What I'm saying is that this yield point is higher when you are comparing specific applications like a bike frame for example. In the video, you can clearly see that the same force (in this case impact) just ruins the aluminium frame while the CF bounces back, repeatedly and while increasing the force applied. I am not saying that it's completely fine and safe, I'm saying it's still a usable bike frame even if unsafe if we are speaking peak strenght. This can make the difference between being able to ride back home and being stranded.
Aluminium is what I go for personally. My bike has aluminium frame with carbon forks. This provides a bit of dampening during the ride but frame is more rigid and not much heavier. Whole bike is like 8.7kg anyway. Also any benefit you gain from getting carbon bike is easily negated by the gear you have to carry with you since you don't have a support team.