Busted Carbon and the Covids

A day or two after that last excursion, I received some brake pads in the mail and went to put them on my bike.

To my horror, I noticed something that I had not noticed before.

I remembered taking a bit of a hit coming down Rock Creek, and thinking: "Oooh, that might be a flat..." But when it never turned into a flat, nor even seemed to have lost any air when I felt it later, I figured that I must have lucked out.

Imagine my surpise.

Amazingly, it had held up the rest of that night, and the entire next day.

I googled the heck out of it and there were all kinds of people with all kinds of ideas about what to do with a buckled carbon wheel. "It's fine, just keep riding it." "Give it a couple of drops of CA glue." "Replace it immediately!" "This is why carbon rims are AWESOME, a metal rim would have broken into a thousand jagged shards that would have impaled you, and you would have died!" "This is why I'll NEVER ride carbon rims, EVER, bury it in the ground before it explodes into a black mist that chokes your cat to death!" And it just descended into tinfoil hattery from there.

I did find a few videos of people doing carbon frame repairs, but they were all from 5+ years ago. Some were pros doing it with all kinds of pro gear and techniques. I only found one or two wheel repair vids. Also old, and on old wheels. None mentioned how well the repair worked out.

I ordered a pair of rims immediately. One to replace this one, and one to keep as a spare. And, while I was at it, I ordered a spare frame too. Sadly, you can no longer order the exact color that you want, only pick from a set of stock colors. So, my spare won't match what I have. Who knows, though? Maybe I'll paint it. There are plenty of videos on how to do that.

I also ordered a carbon repair kit, and I figured I'd give that a go. It would probably be a month or more before the rims came in, shipping being what it is these days.

The repair technique seemed strightforward:

• Sand through the lacquer and resin until you can see the grain and the sanding dust starts to turn grey. That means you're sanding into the carbon.
• Clean it with acetone.
• Cut out a piece of appropriately shaped carbon fiber sheet.
• Mix the resin.
• Apply resin to the part.
• Wait for it to get a little tacky.
• Apply the carbon sheet.
• Apply more resin so that it soaks through.
• Wait for it to get a little tacky.
• Apply another piece of appropriately shaped carbon fiber.
• Apply more resin.
• Wrap it tightly with platic.
• Wait for it to cure.
• Unwrap it all.
• Sand it until it's clean and beautiful and until the dust starts to turn grey.
• Apply protective laquer.

This all seemed within the realm of doability, but it also seemed like it would be a fiddly process. I imagined that there would be nuances to working with the materials, and good results would come more from experience with them. Which I didn't have. I've been in this boat before.

For example...

I once tried to strip the paint off of a light diffuser and repaint it, only to find that it's extremely difficult to get an even coat of paint on a textured surface that light shines through. And, that it gets harder and harder to strip paint off of it after a few tries.

I've also made an absolute mess of circuit boards, soldering and resoldering them.

Model airplanes... glue and putty and paint. Ugh.

I dreaded that it would be like that, and I wasn't disappointed.

When I loosened adjacent spokes, it sort of naturally unfolded, and looked a lot less damaged than it had before, but as soon as I started sanding, it revealed a crack running in both directions around the wheel, which wasn't otherwise visible. That made it look a lot WORSE. Great.

Modern carbon fiber is also nothing like the coarsely woven, large thread diameter carbon that they built with 4 or 5 years ago. It's ultra-fine now, and directional, and the resin is super thin, and it's all very highly compressed. There's very little laquer on the outside too. If you start sanding, you almost immediately get grey dust, and there's not much of a grain to be seen. You just start eating through what must be dozens of unidirectional layers, very tightly compressed together.

It's extremely difficult to cut out an appropriately shaped piece of carbon fiber, even if you make a template. The threads at the edges just want to separate from the rest of the piece. I tried several times before I finally got a sense of how gently I needed to be cutting it.

The resin takes a long time to get tacky. Like 30 or 40 minutes.

In all of the videos I saw, the folks were basically wrapping a cracked tube. I had to secure it to the center of the rim, and then wrap it up around the wall and then down around the outside. It had to make 2 90 degree bends and one 180 degree bend. The resin doesn't get anywere near sticky enough to hold it in place.

I ended up:

• Using masking tape to tape off the area that I wanted covered by the patch.
• Using more masking tape to secure the piece of carbon fiber to the center of the rim.
• Applying resin underneath it.
• Sticking it down.
• Doing a second layer of the same.
• Cramming a precisely cut piece of a pool noodle down onto the part that needed to make all of those bends.
• Wrapping the entire thing as tightly as possible with clear packing tape (non-sticky side towards the carbon).
• Wrapping all of that with masking tape.

Fingers crossed.

After 2 days, I carefully unwrapped it, sanded it until it was as pretty as I figured it was going to get, and retensioned the spokes.

Repaired?

IDK? It was ugly, but it seemed to take the tension. The wheel wasn't true though, and I felt like I really hadn't retensioned it enough, so I took it to Glen, who trued it. It held. The tire seated too, and held air.

Success?

It survived the bumpy drive home, bouncing around on the rack, with the wheel clamped down.

Maybe?!

I put the bike on the rack in the house and went into the living room to watch TV or something. After half an hour, I heard a terrible cracking sound from the other room, followed by another one a few seconds later.

Nooooooo....

It had buckled again in the same location as the original crack.

Dangit. After all that.

Again, advice ranged from: "Ride it and see how it holds up" to "It's going to explode the second your tires touch gravel." I debated what to do. That was a Saturday.

Sunday I didn't have a chance to ride though. I had to replace the lower ball joint and tie-rod end in Isabel's car. This ended up being an all-day affair. She was coughing her fool head off the whole time. Some kids at her gym had been sick earlier in the week. She'd gotten sick too, but waited a few days, gotten a Covid test, and it had come back negative the day before. We figured she must have just had a cold or something.

I forget the exact timing of the rest. I want to say that on Monday the 20th, I went to a Christmas Party at Siracusas, and Eddie crashed at my place that night rather than head back to Birmingham. Maybe he had a fit the next day? I don't remember. The other kid was sick as hell Tuesday morning and had been getting worse since Friday. We figured it was Iz's cold, but just to be sure we got her tested. This took ALL. DAMN. DAY. I got tested too, while we were at it.

Bam! Covid. Mine was negative, but hers was positive. They were rapid tests though, so I didn't really trust mine. For work, the whole household had to get tested, so we went to the only place that was still open.

We got real tests and saw a real doctor. Kathryn was negative. Chucky was negative. Me, Iz, and Sophie were positive. Kathryn and Chucky just likely hadn't incubated long enough.

We were all as vaccinated as possible, but I guess it's not a force field. You're just trained up to produce the right antibodies, which can still take a while to do their job. And, the variants... It's like being ready to fight off a pack of werewolves, then getting attacked by a hoarde of wererabbits.

We were at the very, very, leading edge of the recent wave. On that day, they'd only seen 7 cases at that location, prior to us. The next day it really hit. You couldn't even get them on the phone.

Iz was well the next day. Sophie was well within a day too. Chucky got sick like a week later, but only for a few days. Kathryn was super sick for a few days, then it lingered on and drug out forever. Her boyfriend was like "I'll come take care of everyone, I won't get it!" and had a 104 fever within 6 hours of showing up. I don't know how long he was sick.

I had a 102 fever for 3 days. Fucking muscle aches! My skin hurt too. Any part of me that was touching anything else just burned constantly. I was too tired to even watch TV, and I got super confused. I kept forgetting what day it was and what I'd done that day, which made for some strange conversations with some friends and coworkers. After three days, I got in this pattern where I'd feel kind-of ok for a day, then be sick as hell for the next two days. Then it became ok-for-one-day and sick-for-one-day. Then, last week I was well for 3 days in a row and only a little bit sick yesterday morning. I was good again today, just over a month later.

It wasn't the absolute sickest I've ever been, but it was on par. I didn't touch the bike. I didn't hike. I barely had any human contact for 3 weeks. I barely worked for a month.

I gave it to nearly everybody at the Christmas party, well prior to having symptoms. I exposed Eddie, who didn't get it, but who had to live in Audrey's garage for a week. My new nickname should be "Patient Zero."

Avoid this crap if you can. It's garbage.

The one silver lining was that since we all had it, and since my fever had broken the day before, the kids and I were able to have Christmas together.

I guess another funny thing was that Billy and I have been jokingly calling it "the Covids" for years now, kind of making a dad joke out of it. He upped the game by calling it "the omicrons", then "the omnicrons", and then "the megacrons". So, that's just what it is now: "the megacrons."

Oh, my rims came in too.

Woohoo!

Glen rebuilt my wheel this past Thursday, and had a hell of a time with my brake caliper, which just didn't want to retract all the way. He eventually got it, but it took a lot of fiddling.

So, I'm well enough to mill around outdoors, and my bike works again. I plan on easing back into it tomorrow.

We'll see how it goes.