Resurrect old Peugeot carbon bike?

nferrar

But of a vague one this but I have an old Peugeot carbon road bike circa 1995 that I used to race on and it's been sat in a basement for 10 years. Is it safe to get back on it (besides changing tyres, tubes, maybe chain and maybe getting hubs/headset/bb regreased)? I'm just a bit worried something funky might have happened to the bonding on the frame tubes (I remember even back then someone else in the club had his frame come apart at the head tube but that was replaced under warranty at the time, never had issues with mine).

Don't have the bike handy to post a photo (if that would make any difference) but it's metallic purple (yeah I know ) and cost around £600 for frame/forks I think.

Monty Dog

The Peugeot carbon frames were in fact made by Vitus and pretty similar to their old 979 frames used by the likes of Sean Kelly. The problems with these frames coming apart was due to galvanic corrosion between the aluminium lugs and the carbon tubes - the bare metal in contact with the carbon would cause a elecrolytic reaction with water, leading to white powdery oxide deposits which would cause the joint to expand and fail - often cracking the lugs too. The solution was to anodise the aluminium lugs and to have a far more process controlled bonding stage. Provided there's no evidence of the white powery residue on your lugs or cracking of the aluminium lugs, then there's no reason why your frame should continue. They weren't the stiffest frames in the world - the aluminium fork not helping either - I used to have an Alan Carbonio of similar construction of that era. Find yourself a Mavic SSC groupset of that era and build yourself a retro-classic.

McBain_v1

WOW :!: MontyDog certainly knows his shizzle when it comes to bike bits 8)

nferrar

Monty Dog wrote:

Find yourself a Mavic SSC groupset of that era and build yourself a retro-classic.

It's still got it's dura-ace groupset/spinergy wheels on from the same period luckily Cheers for the advice on looking for residue, I'll inspect it closely and give it some gentle rides to start...

Monty Dog

The experience with carbon and aluminium was when I worked designing prosthetics in 1989 - we were using bare aluminium and carbon and found out the hard way about galvanic corrosion! Carbon bikes then becme increasingly available and guess what, they started falling apart and cracking too.