Damaged Carbon Frame- Is it a Write-Off?

furious_george

Hi there, I was on a ride earlier and had the bright idea of hitting a ford at a considerable speed. The only hitch was that the surface under the water was quite mossy, which caused the bike to slip from under me and it all ended up with me and the bike in a heap on the side of the road. I think that the handlebars swung round violently when they made contact with the ground, and the brake lever's punched a... divot(?) in the top side of my top tube. I was wondering whether anyone could give me a likely prognosis for my frame; it feels dented and looks cracked, but whether that's just the paintwork on the surface or whether it's more severe than that I'm not entirely sure of. I've included a couple of pics, hopefully they'll give an idea of the damage:

karljeff72

Doesn't look too bad,why not take it to a local bike shop and have them look at it or take multiple photos and email them to Trek.
What is your stack height on the stem?maybe add more spacers to avoid this happening again.

rj2013

Almost certainly not a write off, however I am not an expert! When my carbon frame got damaged by chain suck (it put a pretty sizable hole in the chainstay!) I found these guys and they fixed it up, they can even re-spray the colors back.
some of the work they showed me while I was there was amazing, to the extent of even replacing entire top tubes.

drop them a line with photos and ask their advise, they were pretty honest with me and very friendly!
https://www.carboncyclerepairs.co.uk/

steve_sordy

Here is another one that someone else recommended (otherwise I wouldn't have filed it).
https://carbonbikerepair.co.uk/wp/

furious_george

karljeff72 said:

Doesn't look too bad,why not take it to a local bike shop and have them look at it or take multiple photos and email them to Trek.
What is your stack height on the stem?maybe add more spacers to avoid this happening again.

Not sure precisely what the stack height is, or how to go about measuring it, but the bars seem relatively low down and close to the headset. I had previously thought about putting some spacers in because the bars were a bit hard to reach. Wish I had followed through with that plan before this happened! I will look into getting some now though, thanks for the advice. Got the bike second hand unfortunately so I doubt that Trek would be interested...

rj2013 said:

Almost certainly not a write off, however I am not an expert! When my carbon frame got damaged by chain suck (it put a pretty sizable hole in the chainstay!) I found these guys and they fixed it up, they can even re-spray the colors back.
some of the work they showed me while I was there was amazing, to the extent of even replacing entire top tubes.

drop them a line with photos and ask their advise, they were pretty honest with me and very friendly!
https://www.carboncyclerepairs.co.uk/

steve_sordy said:

Here is another one that someone else recommended (otherwise I wouldn't have filed it).
https://carbonbikerepair.co.uk/wp/

Thanks for the recommendations guys, having looked into it some more it would seem that it's very probably repairable, much better than having to buy a new frame!

nickbec

There is a specialist LBS in Leatherhead that does carbon repairs.

mully79

Its quite frustrating that Trek acknowledge there's a problem by having developed a solution, ie a "knock block"but they probably wouldnt accept any fault and would say it was crash damage even if you were the original owner.
It may be worth a call to Trek as the frame warranty might be transferable these days.

furious_george

mully79 said:

Its quite frustrating that Trek acknowledge there's a problem by having developed a solution, ie a "knock block"but they probably wouldnt accept any fault and would say it was crash damage even if you were the original owner.
It may be worth a call to Trek as the frame warranty might be transferable these days.

Sorry about the late reply (don't seem to get notifications via email!), and thanks for bringing this to my attention. I've been pretty gutted about the whole thing and haven't really done anything about it thus far but I will contact Trek about it and see what they say. I never really considered it a design flaw and was willing to accept the blame for crashing in the first place. Having said that, it must be quite a common occurrence for them to have invented the knock block thing, so I might get something out of them...