This carbon fiber Felt AR frame arrived at Ruckus after an incredibly unfortunate event, that being a double chainstay fracture. It sounded like a pretty terrifying accident but luckily our customer was able to walk away unscathed, well save for the bike, that is. The owner of the frame installed two oversized, aftermarket pulleys into the derailleur, hoping for improved shifting performance and watt savings. Unfortunately, those pulleys seized up during a ride and the derailleur wrapped up around the cassette, locking the wheel and ripping it into the chain stays simultaneously. They skidded to a stop with a horrifying carbon crunch, but kept the bike upright, having to retire the frame for a short while. Then it came to us.
We first assessed the damage using our variety of tools in order to gain an entire perspective of the fractured area and how far the damage potentially propagated through the frame. As you can see above, the damage was significant and went completely through all the carbon layers.
As always, we had to machine out large areas of damage in the wet sanding booth before we could begin the rebuild. After we removed the damaged carbon we re-wrapped the area in prepreg carbon fiber and put it through a series of heat and pressure casting. The image you see above is after the frame came out of one these casting cycles.
Then, the frame heads back to structural for another round of carbon fiber application. In this instance, the frame needed a final aesthetic wrap using Textreme, or the checkerboard-type aesthetic look you can see. Then the frame went back into the wet sanding booth to remove the remaining epoxy on the chainstays. You can notice the sheen of the remaining epoxy in the image above.
After much wet-sanding, the frame is finally ready to be decaled and clear coated. The decals of this frame are extremely intricate and needed to be completely recreated by our graphics department. As you can see, they require precise coloring, alignment and application, and it turned out spectacular.
After many hours, the chainstays are rebuilt and structurally sound with original matching graphics and a matched aesthetic carbon weave. Everything we do here at Ruckus is a time-consuming and delicate art, and this frame is exemplary of that process. There’s nothing we love more than perfecting the repair of a once broken frame!