Kestrel repair

Here's my bike in better days, and before the surgery.

The fault could not be seen under the paint, but doing some NCAR repeats I heard a faint creaking, but I just wrote it off. Don't do that, if it happens to you! Pay attention to sounds: you could be accumulating damage.

Later, on another quiet climb (rabbit mountain) I heard it again, worse & felt alround for it. I could feel the tube going soft, and stop the sound, by grabbing it in my fist. That night I sanded it down to find out how bad the damage was. There were 1.5" long cracks, all the way through, on the top & bottom & both sides off the tube! This damage had been growing for a while. Ever since that crash in October, I bet. Here's a picture of the cracks.

Anyway, I went to see Peter at Vecchio's and they said only Calfee repairs carbon and you have to strip & send the frame in for them to provide an estimate. Yikes.

I decided to do it myself. I thought, "I've played with epoxy a lot, fixed my sailboat one time, got an engineering degree: I can do this." Haha! In no time I had covered myself with a fur of carbon fiber and sticky epoxy and began to rethink the project. Luckily I know some guys who've done real construction, even made actual human powered airplanes out of carbon, so I got some much needed advice.

One friend Marc can identify a dozen different kinds of epoxy by smell, and he hooked me up with perforated "mold release" shrink tape which is an absolute necessity. Anyway, I ordered that, and a bunch of different kinds of carbon fiber cloth and tape and twill and a few days later:

Note the carbon is kind of shiny looking. That sheen is from the epoxy. This is after it's all cured: it is no longer wet, but does look it. The repair was a complete success, probably stronger than new and doesn't look bad at all! (or so I think.) It doesn't look new though and never will. I'd have to sand it smooth to get a paintable surface and I'm not going to do that. That would make it dull and I'd never turn in a perfect paint job anyway. The point is what to expect with your own repair is: Light, functional, rock solid, but definitely repaired. (Also, the peeps? It was pure happenstance, but once I got the peeps thing started, they kind of became a theme.)