PhilDawson8270
Veteran
tl;dr
Question at the end, back story first
I am a very experienced mechanic, with backgrounds of building race vehicles, and repairing, building and maintaining large automated machinery.
Though I have broken things here and there like everybody, I have thankfully never done anything that has been dangerous.
However, back in January, I had a skating accident in which I had an open fracture of both radius and ulna. These have been plated, my arm, and hand is back to pretty much full strength, and healed (minus some slow recovering nerve damage to my hand)
What has stayed, surprised me. As I've never been one to shy away from any activity, but now I find myself anxious about anything that could result in falling, and landing onto my arm.
This leads on to all the horror stories you read about carbon bikes, my bike currently has a carbon fork. My engineering knowledge tells me that carbon is supremely strong, and certainly comparable to metals with little to no usage fatigue.
So I purchased my first full carbon bike to build.
To fit the crown race of the integrated headset to the carbon fork (also has a carbon steerer, but where the crown race sits is actually aluminium), I opened up the vice slightly wider than the steerer.
Fitted an old headrace bearing over the crown race, and while holding the forks upside down near brake mount, hit them down with a few sharp strikes, so the old bearing struck the vice, pushing the crown on.
No unusual noises, no gauges in any of the surfaces. However, this doesn't help my irrational anxiety at the moment, with the fear that the impacts can have caused internal damage. That will fail when I am doing 30mph down a hill and I will die in a massive ball of fire (I even believed this would happen with rear mech after I fitted it and adjusted stop screws!).
Help my mind, was my method acceptable? Likelihood of invisible damage? Any simple checks that can be done to check the structural integrity of carbon before I ride it, to make me feel better?
Question at the end, back story first
I am a very experienced mechanic, with backgrounds of building race vehicles, and repairing, building and maintaining large automated machinery.
Though I have broken things here and there like everybody, I have thankfully never done anything that has been dangerous.
However, back in January, I had a skating accident in which I had an open fracture of both radius and ulna. These have been plated, my arm, and hand is back to pretty much full strength, and healed (minus some slow recovering nerve damage to my hand)
What has stayed, surprised me. As I've never been one to shy away from any activity, but now I find myself anxious about anything that could result in falling, and landing onto my arm.
This leads on to all the horror stories you read about carbon bikes, my bike currently has a carbon fork. My engineering knowledge tells me that carbon is supremely strong, and certainly comparable to metals with little to no usage fatigue.
So I purchased my first full carbon bike to build.
To fit the crown race of the integrated headset to the carbon fork (also has a carbon steerer, but where the crown race sits is actually aluminium), I opened up the vice slightly wider than the steerer.
Fitted an old headrace bearing over the crown race, and while holding the forks upside down near brake mount, hit them down with a few sharp strikes, so the old bearing struck the vice, pushing the crown on.
No unusual noises, no gauges in any of the surfaces. However, this doesn't help my irrational anxiety at the moment, with the fear that the impacts can have caused internal damage. That will fail when I am doing 30mph down a hill and I will die in a massive ball of fire (I even believed this would happen with rear mech after I fitted it and adjusted stop screws!).
Help my mind, was my method acceptable? Likelihood of invisible damage? Any simple checks that can be done to check the structural integrity of carbon before I ride it, to make me feel better?
