So you’ve purchased a modern and expensive (…worth it) road bike and you had a small, yet compromising crash. What do you do? FIrst things first…please stop riding it. Next you do have a few options: you can trash it (sad face), you can contact the company who made your bike and attempt the crash replacement warranty (potentially time-consuming and cost prohibitive), or (obviously we’re biased) you repair your bike with us. We firmly believe in keeping good bikes out of landfills and almost every time (even with a serious damage) a repair is still going to be much less than the cost of a replacement. We see it as a win win win. You send nothing to waste, you get to work with a local shop to help with a potential rebuild or new parts sourcing and you get to keep the bike you have and create more memories with it. Everyone gets to help everyone in the repair process. Win. Win. Win.
That’s exactly what happened with our customer on this carbon fiber Trek Domane SL repair. A small wipeout compromised the structural safety of the driveside seatstay, and being such a brand new bike, our customer chose to repair the frame rather than trash it or pursue with a crash replacement.
As the photos depict, the damage was centralized on the driveside seatstay and showed pretty obvious splintering and compromised carbon fiber. So we first inspected the damage using our ultrasound technology to find out just how far the damage radiated. We then sent the bike to be pushed through our damage removal process in our custom wet sanding booths.
We found about 2.5 inches of carbon needed to be removed, so we stripped away all the damaged layers and began the structural rebuild process. The ultrasound technology also allows us to specifically measure the depth of the original layup, thus leaving no unanswered questions or guesswork when replicating the construction. So we completed the layup, sanded out any left over resin from the casting process and finally sent the bike over to be repainted. Of course, we match all paints and recreate graphics in-house.
These particular Trek Domane carbon fiber repairs are a delicate process, but they are certainly gorgeous bikes both with excellent paint and the quality of the carbon layup. We had to subtly match the black sparkle paint with a pearly white area as well, and we couldn’t be happier with how this frame turned out. Is carbon fiber repair safe…absolutely yes and often times it is less expensive and a quicker process than crash replacement procedure. We firmly believe that carbon fiber bikes both new and old are good enough to be replaced, so the choice is yours! Have a carbon fiber frame that needs a little TLC? Send it over to us…we’ve been keeping bikes out of landfills for nearly 9 years now and we’d love to save your frame as well.