The “Fiber SIde Chats” Episode 2 brings two new segments: “This Week in Cycling” where Shawn and Dan cover all things tech/industry related, and “This Week in Repair” where the duo discusses their favorite carbon repairs currently at Ruckus. In addition, the duo discusses this week’s main topic: Trainer Troubles. As always, the #carbonqueries Q/A rounds out the episode.
Dan: 00:00 Hello again everyone and welcome to the second episode of the fiber side chats brought to you by [inaudible] composites, the nation’s leader in carbon fiber repair and inspection where your hosts, Shawn Small owner and engineer, and I’m Dan Steinle, lead the marketing director, and on this week’s episode we’re going to be bringing you a couple of new segments this weekend repair and this week in cycling
Dan: 00:32 OK, thanks again everybody for joining the second episode of the fiber side chats. If you were with us last week, you know that we took a little stroll down memory lane, didn’t we? Show on. It was fun, felt like it was a good place to start. Most people meet and know a lot about our history, but we wanted to embellish a little bit for this week’s episode. We’re gonna be introducing two new segments segments. That’s the word, the first one this weekend repair. Shawn, what are we doing there?
Shawn: 00:58 Uh, for the segment we’ll be highlighting some of our more interesting damaged stories and repair strategies and just kind of tell us a little more about
Dan: 01:07 some of the fun stuff we do here. The other new segment this weekend cycling will be covering current industry trends, hot button issues, the new daily standard of the bike industry and other bits of tech that we think are cool and important to what’s going
Shawn: 01:22 A lot changes every day. We work on it all.
Dan: 01:31 So for this second episode we’re going to be introducing another weekly topic and we’re going to call it this weekend cycling. This is going to be the part of the podcast where we discuss industry trends, hot button issues, all kinds of things. Cycling only attack. Cool. New Tech. Yeah. Pretty much anything that comes up that we find interesting. This is where we want to talk about it. So instead, and as we read that niner pretty exciting brand out of Colorado. Just had to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Pretty interesting considering that only seven days ago they announced that they were going to be selling to the Columbia basin partners. Essentially a large investment group from our understanding on a den, looks like they had been working together for quite a while. They just seem like they’re out, you know, investment or credit group. So what are some of the details of this bankruptcy, Shawn.
Shawn: 02:20 You know, chapter 11 usually forces the company to go through a pretty rigorous restructuring. It was a lot of strategy in there that’s way over my head, but it’s probably going to help them get out of some debt, get out, uh, some interest payments and just allow them to, I don’t know, move some money around and ways they’ve never been able to do before. It’s not as a terrible or aggressive as chapter seven. That’s where you basically have to liquidate everything. So niners not going anywhere. I’m at least that we know of. What we will see probably is a different shift in focus for the company. What did they say? Something something. Knee channel platform
Dan: 03:00 where they’re going to be focusing on different kinds of bikes. Right. Basically, I think they’re going to be not making any XC bikes anymore. Uh, that’s probably not true. I’m sure that makes sense.
Shawn: 03:11 XC bikes or just, you know, the competition has gotten fierce overall sales globally. Then down, you know, they’re a small company with a very small product offer. You know, they don’t make a true road bike. They may, what is it, the [inaudible] that’s there, like gravel slash Crockett Spike, you know, it’s actually a pretty cool bike. There’s a lot of. It has a lot of great ideas in it, but you know, they really, what do they offer? Maybe 10 different models. I don’t even know. It’s not that many.
Dan: 03:36 I think where we’ll see the shift in focus as they mentioned that they’re going to be putting out more kids bikes, putting out more easily
Shawn: 03:44 bikes and they want to come out with a women’s specific line, which is cool. Yeah, that’s great. Um, you know, if this allows them to stick around and you know, more businesses make everybody be a little more honest and competitive, you know, I hope they stick around.
Dan: 03:58 I did six, 15,
Shawn: 04:01 29. That is the only question that remains. It’s built into their business, but they can’t do anything except 20 years. They’re going to be starting inside company just called 6:50, so make sure you watch out for those hard tail. What’s interesting to me about all of this is people are still shopping in bike shops, which is great. Especially for a big mountain bike. You want to test ride it. They’re all different. They all handle different. Well, especially when it’s eighty $500. Yeah. You need to write it before you buy it, but yeah, if not three times and then you try another one, you’re like, oh shit. Yeah. Sixty eight degrees is better than 68 and a half. I totally helped me clear the berm. If you clear burns, I think you slapped burns a slap and brooms because I thought you said Slap Bass in college. I did in grade school. Boy, was that funny. You guys heard all along the watchtower?
Shawn: 05:03 Uh, I was never a stand up bass and I was too small over way too small. Couldn’t even like hug me. You know, I wasn’t about to play a viola. So No. I could not imagine having seven point $8,000,000 in liabilities. There’s a seven point 8,000,000, so what were they doing? Just throwing away money. I mean importing goods is a risky business because you got to pay for it all up front with the hope that you’re going to sell it. So you take out a lot of money, get all your product made, then you got to sell it in the bike industry, that’s super hard because you have a very short selling season. Um, you really only have a few months to sell a mountain bike before you need to then discount it just to get rid of it because six months, I mean you already got to be pushing that next, that next product and new one.
Shawn: 05:59 It’s an aggressive product cycle that just kill some of these smaller brands. I don’t think even the big brands. I mean, I’m sure they’re not that stoked about it, but it’s expensive. It’s basically just taking $100 bill and just lighting it on fire every second or faster. I was just reading about Tesla. They’re burning. Got Eight thousand dollars a minute to operate. They have a lot of employees, but. And I forget what it comes down to. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. That’s unbelievable. Yeah. A thousand dollars a minute. Yeah. So what you do is it’s known as runway. Um, so you basically look at how much money they have. I forget what they have in their bank from their investing around a couple hundred million dollars or something. And you basically look at their operating costs per minute and you go, oh, they can only operate for six more months, you know, realistically, you know, that’s, that’s how long they got left and that’s just with money they have now that’s invested or borrowed or however they got it. A lot of companies operated that way. It’s, you know, big risk, big rewards. But it also can be pretty big failures.
Dan: 07:18 for this week and repair, we’re going to be checking out a pretty interesting bike, but it’s an indie fab from our friends down at studio bell in Mill Valley, California. I know you’ve all seen these. They’re the carbon tubed, titanium lugs, bikes. Uh, why did this one come in? John?
Shawn: 07:36 Um, it’s an older bike. It’s beautiful. And it’s in great shape, but they just wanted us to run a basic inspection on all the joints to make sure all the carbon tubes are still bonded. Well to the titanium.
Dan: 07:48 This bike is so old that it has a straight steer tube. Can you believe it?
Shawn: 07:53 Years. Now
Dan: 07:57 I also ride only one inch tube. So I know about old.
Shawn: 08:02 It uses a threaded bottom racket. Whoa. What 1:30 road spacing. Who does that anymore? Releases. Get Me Outta here. So why did this one come in? John, this is a classic bike made by any fab that uses titanium lugs, titanium rear end, and a carbon fiber tubes on the main triangle.
Dan: 08:22 And this one came in because our customer thought that they had felt some interesting vibrations. Am I right on that?
Shawn: 08:31 I think so. Um, story goes, you know, bikes make a lot of noise and you know, if you ever have a question about the safety of your bike, please contact us. We’re always happy to take a look. Um, with this case, you know, these types of these bikes are very unique. What we’re able to do is give them a full inspection to make sure all the tubes are still bonded very well in firmly to the titanium lugs are customer suspect. It makes that
Dan: 08:56 or more of the bonded areas where the carbon meets the titanium is coming loose. Um, how do you check for that,
Shawn: 09:04 John? There’s a couple of different methods. You know, sometimes the quickest thing we always do is just visual. You can see physical movement, that’s pretty obvious what yet again, one of the things that makes us unique is our ability to ultrasound ultrasound through all the materials. Stack appears very hard. Basically we calibrate our transducer to penetrate through the titanium, through the epoxy bonding layer and through the carbon tube and what we’re looking for is voids or porosity or air gaps that are showing that the log is separating from the carbon tube and what the transducer is. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s the small part of the ultrasound machine that converts the Mechanical Energy and what it does is it radiates through the frame and we can graph that input and output and see how the readings changed from
Dan: 09:55 material that allows us to see the layup structure, it allows to equality and we can find the carbon, we can find the epoxy and we can find the titanium. So we’re able to see fully if any of those things are moving.
Shawn: 10:05 Yeah, it’s a really powerful tool. It’s not easy to use. Um, it’s a tool. It’s probably only, it’s only useful if you know what you’re reading. Uh, everything’s just a raw way of form. It’s taken us a long time and a lot of hours and years of experience to get this far. Every, every case is unique. And yet again, we’ve looked at [inaudible] over 7,000 bikes, so we’ve seen it all were ultra sound at inspecting. Correct.
Shawn: 10:33 Gotcha.
Dan: 10:37 So the next bike up for this week and carbon repair is a [inaudible] a case of a real yahoo on a Wahoo. This spike arrived at Ruckus after an incident in spin class
Shawn: 10:54 as I like to call it, a trouble with a trainer with, oh, I’ve fallen off roller as myself more than once. So
Dan: 11:00 definitely not unique. Uh, embarrassing. Yeah. Question Lisa. We’ve all done it. Um, but yeah, this bike showed up with a broken dropout and a broken seat stay after the individual was, were they chasing down a sprint on, on swift or
Shawn: 11:18 I’m going to class. They’re in some sort of spin class and putting in a pretty solid effort, decided to stand up and you start rocking the bike side to side and you know, I think just tipped over
Dan: 11:31 the resulting tip. Real typical new, a dropout broke seats state broke. So not only do we have to fix the dropout, we have to fix the seat stay. Shawn, what does a dropout replacement look like?
Shawn: 11:46 Um, and it’s definitely one of our more complicated repairs. We’ve been doing it pretty much the beginning. A drought, typical dropout repair for us is I actually go in and I measure up the original dropout and I recreated in solid works. Solidworks is a 3d modeling engineering software, and then once a model up a do a couple iterations with their 3d printer and basically what I’m doing is trying to recreate the shape as closely as possible with a dropout. Any small, even half millimeter or millimeter difference. It’s gonna make your wheel crooked in the frame and for example, Los [inaudible], there’s not a lot of clearance, so we always crooked. It would probably then break your chain state or something. After I confirm and do typically two or three 3d prints, we then CNC machine, a dropout from solid carbon fiber plate. The benefit of this, it allows us to then capture everything I designed in the 3d models.
Shawn: 12:50 That way when we put the bike in the frame jpeg, put the new dropout in. It’s a pretty easy plug and play idea. We then have to go in and you know, do a little bit of blending and we’ll wrap and form new carbon around our new dropout to the remainder of the frame. We want to make sure everything’s perfectly strong and you never see any problems. Again, we’re the only company that does full drop-out replacement. It’s complicated. There’s a lot that can go wrong, but I think we’ve done close to 500 at this point. We got it down and we’ve never seen one come back either. So that’s also something to note. Yeah, it’s a pretty solid piece of carbon. It’s almost seven millimeters thick. It’d be pretty hard to break it. I mean you’d have to do something pretty extraordinary to snap that thick of a piece of carbon.
Shawn: 13:39 Not Impossible, but something that we have ridiculous. So after we get the dropout in and the bike fixed up, we’ll paint it black a, throw some glass, clear coat on it and return it to service. Ready for duty. Everything. Everything we do here follows a strict qc process before it ever goes home. We want to make sure you know when your mechanic or you know if you’re doing your assemblies at home, everything’s perfect and ready to go for you. So we check final wheel alignment. We want to make sure the wheel sits perfectly in your break bridge. If it’s a road bike or a disparate bike. We just want to make sure that you’ll never have problems again, so if you’re a real Yahoo, Ottawa, who that’s having trouble with a trainer, let us know. We got you. We’ve also been there ourselves
Dan: 14:24 for more about these two repair cases. Make sure to check out our website, ruckuscomp.com/news
Dan: 14:40 Our main topic for this week’s episode is trainer troubles. We all know that winter has arrived for most of us and we’re going to be talking about how to properly set up your trainer and what to do when you’re trainer fights. There’s a
Shawn: 14:52 lot that can go wrong when you’re writing as putting your bike in a stationary trainer this winter. So
Dan: 14:58 the tip, the first tip we want is you are definitely going to want to put a towel on your bike and the trainer. Why do you want to do that? Because y’all nasty when you’re at inside on a trainer. Doesn’t matter the amount of fans you have, you’re still going to sweat a why is sweat bad for a bike shop?
Shawn: 15:13 Sweat can exacerbate corrosion and rust on your bike. It’s either through a process called rusting, if it’s steel or oxidation, if it’s aluminum, and that’s typically caused by a dis similarity and the electronegativity of those materials.
Dan: 15:30 Now if you have a carbon bikes, it’s not really going to do much to the carbon material itself, but as Shawn mentioned, if you have all those different metals coming together at a place they meet, think of your bearings, think of your seat tube going in your headset, all that stuff can start to corrode. And obviously if the grease is start to go and do to corrosion, bearings seize up. Now it’s not a problem really enormously difficult to replace any of those bearings, but it can be a hassle. Right? And also some of these bearings aren’t cheap, so is anything going to go wrong structurally because of galvanic corrosion
Shawn: 16:02 with your carbon? No. But, um, with some of your attachment points, if you have anything that’s riveted on, you know, that’s going to be like your cable stops, your, for your derailers or your break or an area that’s almost always aluminum is the water bottle bosses. That’s the actual threaded part. And we put the screw in for your water bottle cage on your down to be in your seat tube.
Dan: 16:24 What happens when those corrode is, again, that’s another structural point. If you go and try and grab your water model too hard or put it back in your cage too hard and all that stuff’s corroding. It was a chance. And we’ve actually seen this of those breaking completely out of the bike.
Shawn: 16:39 Yeah, yeah. Again, if you’re going to be riding indoors, make sure you wipe your bike down after you ride it. It’s pretty easy to, I would say, spray it off it just clean water, you know it’s indoors. Even if they little gets inside your frame, it’s going to evaporate pretty quickly. Yet again, just try to keep things clean this winter.
Dan: 16:53 Make sure your grease in your seat posts. If you have a carbon bike, make sure you’re always checking to see if your carbon paste in there in ingress point for water into a frame is very commonly found around the seat post as well. So you might think, oh, I have a towel covering the front handlebars. There’s always a chance water can seep in, in through any one of these multiple scenes. So yeah, regular maintenance, make sure you’re checking up on things constantly. You would rather when all the little small victories and end up having to do a full overhaul at the end of the season just from riding indoors. And again, we’ve seen all this before, so firsthand accounts really from us.
Shawn: 17:31 If you think you have corrosion going on one way to identify it as you’ll see typically bubbles and the clear coat if it’s not painted, but it’s painted and you can’t really tell the paint itself will start bubbling off the frame. Um, yeah. Again, it’s not causing any damage to the carbon, but paint starts to fall off pretty quickly. And if around some of the mechanical alloys spots where the aluminum spots, you’ll start noticing probably a white dust eventually if it gets to that point, call us on. That’s getting to a point where you are starting to lose a significant amount of the metal. We stock most small parts here. We can fabricate a lot of replacement parts as well and get you back rolling.
Shawn: 18:17 I have another one,
Dan: 18:25 a little winter trainer tips is about proper installation of your carbon bike into the trainer. Now most of these are going to be using some kind of through axle or quick release mechanism. The biggest hit that we can give you, this isn’t going to sound very dominant, but it is and it’s true. Just slow down, take a moment, do it properly. We’ve seen so many broken dropouts due to people over clamping their trainers. We can’t even really describe how many because it’s been how many. It’s probably been more than 25.
Shawn: 19:03 Yeah. And basically the idea there is you just want to clamp correctly and yet again, it sounds obvious. Check your manual,
Dan: 19:12 make sure everything’s seated in there
Shawn: 19:15 the way it’s supposed to be. You know, make sure the bike’s not crooked. Um, because then when you put all your weight on it and you start pedaling hard and putting in those efforts you’re doing,
Dan: 19:24 you could cause a lot of damage. And as we’ve discussed already with this weekend, carbon repair, if the bike’s not seated in the trainer properly, it can throw off the entire balance, resulting in your tipping over, damaging your frame in a multitude of ways. So yeah, proper installation, please slow down. It’s not a race to get onto your trainer, right? Once you’re on your trailer and it’s lifting race type scenarios can come. Can we get that? You know you want to. You call the duty for cyclists. Pretty much you can. You can go do that, but take the proper time, slow down, install your bike properly in the trainer,
Shawn: 20:01 and if you have any fears of riding a trainer for the first time, the safest thing you can always do is set it up in a doorway. First Time I wrote rollers, it was, it’s hard. It’s not easy and it’s a great exercise to learn. A lot of new balance. But boy did I bounce off each walls of the store, weighs a ton and fell over. And I know that was comical like anybody’s first time on rollers. It’s not. It’s easiest surprisingly.
Dan: 20:25 You step down on that pedal and you’re like, oh wait, I have to keep pedaling.
Dan: 20:41 now it’s about the time in the podcast where we move on from our discussion and into our carbon queries. As always, these are audience generated questions that we get through all of our social media platforms. You can submit questions on Instagram, facebook, twitter, or linkedin. We’re all at Ruckus comp using the Hashtag carbon queries. The first question this week, how broken is too broken to ride? Shawn, you want to start with that one?
Shawn: 21:11 I’m really a bike. Doesn’t have a lot of material in at this point. You know, a lot of great carbon bikes are 800 grant. Um, so every fiber is important. There’s not a lot there at this point. Most carbon bikes are ultra wide regardless of material. If a tooth is broken, it’s not safe to ride. We’re always going to err on the side of safety here. Ah, it’s not worth the risk of all bikes are so lightweight nowadays. Even heavies, early Crosstrek, you know a broken top tube is still not going to fully support you the way it’s supposed to and if you’re riding down a steep hill or trail, doesn’t matter what type of bike or terrain you’re writing, getting hurt socks. I don’t know if anybody, I’m sure a lot of cyclists out there broken collarbones before and it’s not something you want to review. The realest, most repairs are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
Dan: 22:03 Broken is too broken to ride in our eyes. Really anything. We make the joke constantly around here that a ship floats until the sinks know there’s a lot of truth to that. Your top tube, you know it might look like a small crack in your top tube and you’re down tube, but what happens over time is vibrations make damages bigger in carbon bikes and if you have anything sacrificing the structural integrity of a tube, as Sean mentioned, it’s not going to fully support you. So over time you might have something seemingly small on the outside. It’s going to keep growing and propagating. Maybe visually, maybe not, but over time you know that ship is going to sink. So one of the things that we always say as, as Sean mentioned, is we err on the side of safety. Any damage is too broken to ride because it’s not worth it. Your dental and medical bills are going to be way more than the cost of repair. Even if you don’t want to repair and you get a manufacturer’s warranty. Hey, you got yourself a new bike. Right? And that’s paramount. Safety is paramount. So in our eyes.
Shawn: 23:05 Yeah, and a good time to always check your bike because if you’re cleaning it up and down with a rag or towel, you know, grab a little flashlight and just kind of look over the frame quick, you know, it takes maybe 20 seconds after you have a question about anything and yet again tag us or email us or get a of in any way. We’re happy to answer those questions.
Dan: 23:23 So we chose this next question because it relates to the one prior. In a lot of ways, the question is, so my top tubes broken, why can’t I just epoxy that crack? Heck
Shawn: 23:33 yeah. There’s really a couple main points here. A one carbon fiber gets his strength from the film. It’s not the epoxy to. Most of the APOC sees that the average consumer can get from the hardware store. They suck and they may say to Tom or whatever, they’re not worth it, and three, the only safe way to do a full carbon repair is you’ve got to remove a lot of material. You have to get all that damage out of there and you got to safely replaced it with new carbon fiber. Otherwise your repairs just gonna fail. Again,
Dan: 24:04 if you don’t remove that damaged material, as Shawn mentioned, carbon keeps vibrating and so those damages can keep spreading even if you put proxy in there. So what you might think to be a perfectly fine epoxy job can actually be spreading underneath at at a non visual level. So for all those reasons, you cannot just epoxy damage.
Dan: 24:27 The next question is, can I drill da two holes at home?
Shawn: 24:32 No, because your bike doesn’t have a lot of material in it again, and boy drilling carbon is not easy. Um, you can’t use drill normal drill bits. They do make special composite robots. They’re like $80 a piece or will be used here or diamond hole saws typically, and there’s kind of a very special way to do it that you don’t create more problems and when we, you know, we professionally can set up your bike for Dui to. And the way we do that is, you know, we’ll take off all those cable stops. Um, you know, one of the points of going da too is it makes your bike clean and the best thing you can do there is get everything off, will paint over it, make it look like they were never there. And in that process, what we do is we actually reinforce the area where we put the holes and that’s kind of the most important part. If you’re not reinforcing it, you’re just kind of putting a bunch of holes in your bike. Um, and that’s dangerous. But Shawn, nothing is lighter than a whole. That’s true. Trillium, it used to be very popular, but that’s when bikes were very heavy and then they would still break.
Dan: 25:34 Another thing to think about for this is we know the internal construction of almost every bite we see already because we’ve seen them before. You at the consumer level may not know whether your bike has a full open internal construction, so if your bike doesn’t have a full open internal construction and you go to put d two holes in your bike without knowing the actual construction, you might not be able to fish wires through in the first place.
Shawn: 26:00 Yeah, you’re not going to get very far when you hit the bottom rock and Shell.
Dan: 26:03 So now you’ve just put two holes in your bike for your Dui to wire in any way.
Shawn: 26:08 Yeah, so the whole point of going to to make your bike clean, let us do it. The clean way at, we’ll paint it up will make it look good. It’ll look brand new. We can even help you install it. If you’d like.
Dan: 26:19 Even better, we’ll set up a tab for you.
Shawn: 26:21 Yeah, those are our favorites. They don’t require much. We’ll just paint over all the holes and away you go, but it looks good. We can use a free meetup groups or I am.
Dan: 26:32 Thanks to everybody who submitted a question for our carbon queries. As always, you can reach us on almost any form of social media at Ruckus comp using the Hashtag carbon queries if you have any pressing carbon
Dan: 26:44 fiber related questions, but that about tapes it up for today’s episode. Thanks for joining all that tapes the box for this episode. Thanks again for tuning in to the fiber side chats where your hosts Shawn Small. I’m Dan Stanley. Remember the only moment we have is the present to check into it every once in awhile.
Shawn: 27:19 Nice Arnette32 small 30 [inaudible] rights. Why are you guys so cute? Thanks mom. Are you fish@AOL.com? When are you going to get a real job? I teach. That’s my dad. So this is how you spend your time though. They pay you for this is what are you doing? What is this podcast thing anyway? You spent six years in Latin. What are you going to be an attorney yet following the family name and styling. This is Stanley Stein and Stein and Stein and Stein. Least nine weeks. Nine meetings. Family stinely. Nice to meet you. Primarily me. Does that ever come up before? How do you do that? How do you always come up with nicknames that nobody’s ever heard of but are very obvious? My entire life. Don’t ever call me that. Before this one girl in college name was. Jesse was just like, wait, did you say Juicy Burger? And now that’s her entire life. She’s juicy Burger, instagram, handle hands, everything spelled different. Burger underscore, GC, edgy for everything.