doh! my girlfriend tipped my slc-sl over and it hit a support beam in the basement. the top tube is now cracked :( i know that calfee does a really good job at doing frame repairs, and that's initially who i was going to send it to, but my lbs told me that hot tubes does frame repairs as well and that i should consider sending it to them (in part to cut down on the shipping costs). is there anyone that has any experience with hot tubes' repair jobs? my primary concern is that the job is well done - and if it means paying an extra $100-$150 in shipping costs, that's fine with me.

Can we see pictures.

 Is you girlfriend still your girlfriend?!? ;)

 I can empathise though, I did exactly the same thing to my original R3 SL breaking one of the seat stays. In the end I went for a crash replacment frame.

 I still have the old broken frame at home ( with bottom bracket sawed out of it ), can't bear to throw it away.

thom_y:

Can we see pictures.

will do when i get home from work today.

and yes, she's still my girlfriend - but not if she breaks frames on a frequent basis ;)

I didn't know you could repair carbon frames? I was told that you can't...

it depends on how big the crack/break is. in my case, it's a relatively small crack, so it's not out of the realm of possibility to repair it.

essentially what they'll end up doing is slathering epoxy onto my toptube, around which they'll wrap a sheet of carbon fibre. of course, if you go to a professional, they won't do such a crude job.  

i have a friend (a serious cyclist, to boot) studying chemical engineering who's in taking a class on composite materials right now, and he offered to do it as an experiment of sorts. i've declined to take him up on his offer, though!

Shipping costs are not going to be that different. Hottubes is in the Boston area, and Calfee is in Santa Cruz (near San Francisco). You will only be sending the frame anyway so it will be in a frame box with minimal weight. Hottubes has an agreement with Cervelo for repainting, so the warranty issues might be better with them: the Calfee repair might void the warranty, I don't know.

We can put a man on the moon, but we can't fix a carbon fiber bike?!?!?! Tip of the hat to Jerry Seinfeld.

I breached a Specialized S Works frame that only had about 100 miles on it; sent it to Calfee and it came back as good as new structurally.  You can tell where the work was done, but not unless you look really close.  The cost was about $500 including shipping both ways (which I thought was a great deal considering Specialized would have done a crash replacement at $1,900).  I have ridden it about 500 miles since the repair and it performs at top level. 

 

 

As far as the repair just send it to calfee, he knows carbon better then most manufactures.  As far as warranty it is gone either way, hot tubes will not void the warranty on a paint job, but no matter where the carbon repair is done it will be voided.

 

sam is right - hot tubes would void the warranty, so that's a non-issue.

in any event, i've jumped back in time to get these pictures as requested!