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Ever wonder what happens if you dent, ding or crack your fancy carbon frame? I did, so I asked the experts at Ruckus Composites. Shawn and Dan walked us through what can be done to salvage a damaged frame or component. This week's sponsor is you. See how. Ruckus Composite Website. Ruckus Composite Instagram. Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos. All right, welcome. Everybody. We're live from the gravel ride podcast. And today we've got some guests from, from Ruckus talking about carbon warfare. It's actually quite timely for me as a couple of friends that asked me about some carbon repair work they wanted to have done, and I had no idea how to approach it. So gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thanks for, thanks for having us. Can you guys start by introducing yourself? Take away. All right. Yeah. As Dan said, I'm Shawn and the owner and founder, and I started ruckus over 12 and a half years ago. Yeah. My name is Dan and I am our repair strategist and customer success person Right on Shawn. What was the impetus behind starting Ruckus? Okay. Is kind of a long rambling story of, I was 24 at the time, fresh out of engineering school and really liked bikes. And didn't really fit the traditional mold of being an engineer. I'm not an office guy per se. Um, I can't spend all my day on a computer, so I would like working with my hands a lot, really wanted to create a business where I could work with my hands, but also kind of create the ideas that were locked up in my crazy head Right on. And were you, did you start it off as sort of a one man show? Oh yeah. Robot or two. I probably had a Roomba at the time that Rubin's ever around, but I always try to keep a balance of one human and one robot at every time. There you go. That's the engineering year. Right? Exactly. So I was excited to talk to you guys about carbon bike repair, cause it is a little bit of a mystery to me, how it all works. And you know, you think about cracking a carbon frame or at least I did prior to this conversation that, you know, the thing's hosed it's, you know, I'm never going to be able to ride it again. Can you talk about the types of repairs that are possible for carbon frames? Did Dan you're good at this one? Yeah. I mean, it's, for us, it's kind of the circumstance of we can repair almost anything, but it's only really, we take it to the point where we think it's safe to do so. A lot of times, you know, things that will decline, for example, our car and bike situations where a rider will get into an accident and, you know, bikes that have four or five visible damages. Um, technically we could repair something like that, but we don't really deem it safe to do so. Um, that's like the extent of things that we won't do. Um, but for the most part, you know, we do basic tube repairs. We do dropout replacements. Uh, we can do full bottom bracket, repairs and replacements as well. Um, you know, we, we will, a lot of things that we've been seeing recently, uh, our tire rubbed damages on gravel bikes, for example, people, the combination of too wide of tires in a given condition that isn't suitable, um, front derailer mounts have been coming off. Boy, am I missing anything? Sean? There's a lot. We do. We do a, we do a lot, a lot, a lot of different types of repairs on a very regular basis. Yeah, it's pretty, very, but you know, at the same point, it's just, we see the same bike over and over or same bikes over and over and over again. So it's some days it feels a little bit not honest. And you kind of forget that. We see some of the most interesting things on the bike side. Like we already got a brand new specialized 20, 20 Shivan and it's like, I haven't even seen this bike online. It's got this kind of cool, uh, course of the camera. Cool. Like vertical cross cross fork, and you look at it and you're like, okay, bikes are getting crazy again. It looks just like that. It looks just like the Lotus track bike fork. Oh yeah, Yeah. It's that dual, that dual bladed thing. So yeah, we do. Um, it's, it's again, it's like we can, we can repair almost anything, but we choose, you know, specifically based on whether it's safe or not to do Right. What did that poor individual with the brand new Shiv do to his bike to put it in your hands Shipping damage hasn't even been built for assembly yet. And it's just getting shipped across the country. And I don't know a lot of shipping companies that are generally fine, but you know, you throw enough probability into it and you know, there may be 10%, 5% of scenarios and you're going to be on the losing end every now and then. So shipping insurance is always good. So what does that process look like on your end? So let's just say I've cracked my chain stay and maybe, you know, I see some damage, but I don't see a hole. Do I send it up to you? And do I get some sort of analysis back for me to consider if the repair is something I want to move forward with? Yeah. Where we usually start with something like this as we'll have the customer send us pictures, um, and a variety of ways, email, we, our number also gets texts as well. So it's, it's an easy way to communicate with people, but we usually start with photos. Um, on the odd chance we can actually tell, um, you know, through a photo only, um, if the bike is okay, we'll just tell the customer to monitor it. But most things start with the photo. Um, and then we take out a case and we'll bring in the bike. And if the area is in question of if it's broken or not, it goes through the ultrasound scan process. Um, and through that, we can determine, you know, empirically within a thousandth of an inch, whether the bike is actually damaged or not. Um, and then after that's all said and done, we'll communicate with the customer again, if the bike is okay, it's, you know, ready to send home at that point, if they want, uh, if they want to paint, touch up, we can do that. Or if the bike actually needs to be repaired, they'll get a confirmation of the original estimate at that point. A and then we can Begin the repair process if it's a normal tube repair, uh, at pretty much at that time. So yeah, it usually starts out with photos and a conversation of what, you know, the rider was doing at the time, what the damage looks like and kinda on top of that, like we've seen over 13,000 cases. So we were pretty good idea if someone says, Oh, I have this type of bike and this type of bike and they go, Oh yeah. Is your seat stay broke. Okay, Cool. Gotcha. So when I imagine ultrasound, I'm thinking of a doctor and a pregnant woman and that little gel, what goes on when you ultrasound a bike? I mean, that's exactly, that's exactly it. It's, it's a very, it's a it's that. So Sean has a couple of fluid that he puts over the area and our transducer is, is what, two and a half to 2.5, right? Shawn, 2.5 millimeters in diameter. No, it's four it's four. Okay. So he has a four millimeter transducer that he puts over the area and it puts a wave sound into the bike and comes back. The readout would be different from something that you would see in the hospital. Uh, it's more of a wave form than actually an image, but Shawn is able to tune the wave based on the specific layup of the bike to gain the information that he would need to determine if something would be broken. So if I had to, I say I had a really bad scratch, you know, from a rock. And I clearly went through the paint and into the carbon fiber. Is that analysis able to tell you, you know, from that wall thickness, you've gone halfway through it or three quarters of the way through it. Yeah, exactly. So kind of how that works is the ultrasound is Dan said, it kicks out a wave the way it penetrates through the carbon bounces off the backside. And it comes back to my transducer. That's kind of how we read it. And if we hit something that would be an air pocket or Boyd, or, you know, if there was less material, the screen's going to show that and we have to, you know, we have to interpolate it a little bit or interpret it quite a bit to kind of convert that squiggly wave form into, you know, a bicycle, but it's kind of the gist of it. And is there, is there some amount of carbon kind of deep scratch that is okay and livable and you'll message back to the customer, Hey, you know, you're only 15% down. It's probably safe. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's, it kind of, every single bike is different. Every single rider is different. Every single location is different. Like, you know, it doesn't matter the material per se, but almost every bike, the wall thickness of whether it's steel or aluminum or titanium or carbon changes so much throughout a bike. You know, we have, we see some mountain bikes nowadays that are over three millimeters thick of carbon, which is insanely thick. Wow. And then we have certain seat stays that are our top tubes that are only 0.7 millimeters, which is like next to nothing. So everything's gotta be kinda comparative or you kinda look at the whole picture of like, okay. And then, you know, we don't like to think of like the rider too much. We like to think of just making sure everybody's safe. So we don't really take into account if someone's like, well, I don't really hit too big of jumps. And you're like, you know, we talked to some guys up in Bellingham or Whistler and you know, to them and I don't, I personally don't leave the ground. So anything leaving the ground is a big job. So Yeah, absolutely interesting. And so the, can the range of repair work go from, you know, that deep scratch that has affected structural integrity to a complete break in a tube? Oh yeah. The entire tube could be severed off or even missing. We've replaced entire tubes before, you know, it's a little more severe. Um, but really, you know, there's not a lot of limits and that's kinda one of the cooler things about composites as a material versus like some of the metals is, you know, your repair work is so much smaller. Um, it's more of a localized repair versus having to replace an entire tube, you know, with a metal bike, you know, you can repair any metal bike as well. Um, but it typically takes an entire to replacement. So it's surprisingly way more expensive. You know, most composite repairs are about 500 bucks or less on average, but you know, metal repairs, you're closer to a thousand. So let's, let's take a couple of the different scenarios. Let's stick one on the one hand, which is just maybe a, a piercing or a scratch that is, is definitely dangerous and needs to be repaired. What does that repair look like? How do you actually address my carbon frame with the materials you're going to use to really support it? Good question. Um, it's, as far as the repair goes, our process for let's say it, you know, some something that we've seen a number of times is a very piercing strike on, on a down tube. Uh, but Santa's mountain bike, especially recently, the way that all of the down tubes are being extruded from the bottom bracket with more of an exaggerated curve, we see a lot of damage to that area. So the process for our repair is repeatable, but not necessarily, not necessarily always similar if you know, we're doing the same steps towards every bike, but every damage is different. So it's not exactly the same process. Um, so the cost options that we provide are not tuned towards the repair. It's all on the finishing side. So basically every normal tube repair that we do, we'll give our customers a range of options from just a basic mat, black paint or a Mason or basic matte black vinyl wrap to a full paint match. And that customer is getting the same exact safe repair lifetime, but we're going to give them a different option of price depending on what they want it to look like. Because some people don't care. You know, some people are like, Hey, it's my mountain bike. I'm going to beat the crap out of it. I'll take the $500 repair rather than the full paint match. You know, that, that works fine for somebody they're getting the same fix either way. So if I've pierced my frame, um, is it sort of like you're taking some carbon material and almost bonding a bandaid of carbon over top of that, It's a little more involved than that. It's, you know, carbon composite repairs better on the aerospace industry for a long, long time. So there's already proven standards written by the American society of mechanical engineers or American society of testing and materials. And we really follow up pretty similar guidelines of repairing tubes is a little more complicated, especially tubes of insane geometry that bikes have nowadays, whether they're, you know, ovals schools, squares, or rectangles around. Um, but it all kind of starts with, you know, we evaluate that whole area and we kind of have to like map out how far the damage goes for starters. And then after we map out the damage extent, we got to kind of map out the repair extent, which is usually extents. You know, let's call it three inches and every direction around it. And what we do is we then kind of excavate or machine out all the broken fiber and we get rid of it. You know, it's not doing anything there's not really much you can do with it to kind of repurpose it. So then we kind of machine out all that area and sand it all out and get rid of it. And now we apply a brand new carbon fiber on top of it and taper it out through the entire tube to make sure the entire tube is completely strong repaired, and we're not creating any stress risers anywhere on the bike. Gotcha. And then we add one of our listeners write in and ask about, you know, the completely broke the stay. Are you basically then sort of sawing off the, you know, the completely mangled sections and adding in an entirely new tube? Uh, we could be, we do a lot of three D printing in house. We have a big, we've always had a big strap, like professional, industrial Stratasys 3d print machines. So we can pro um, or three D print and design molds and tools and inserts. And you know, and the hardest part with honestly with bikes is in maintaining the integrity of alignment. You know, if there's a slight variation at your dropout, um, your wheel's going to be crooked and with everybody's running huge tires right now, which is great. But if you then have a, like a, a little bit of a dropout misalignment and then multiply that over 13 inches of a wheel radius give or take, and that exacerbates the angle so bad that it pushes your wheels straight into your chance. So the hardest part is sometimes alignment more than anything, just making sure, you know, we're trying to align kind of thin air with certain repairs. You're like, well, I need to put this seats. I need to put a seat, stay back in the frame, but there's a huge gap in between. So how do we fill that gap? There's a lot of puzzles involved Frame alignment tools. Yeah. We probably have almost every tool you can, you end up having frame alignment tools to help in that process? Yeah. We have framed jigs. We've had a lot of custom built tools. We have, you know, end mills for milling and mitering. We have drill presses of, you know, we have almost every tool you can think of. Like, don't forget the lady, boy, the lady boy, which so we can lay it all around tools and answers. Um, repair is more about like being inventive an…
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