pretty unlikely that you'd get a hole in your bike from just a rack dropping. and I mean very, very, very unlikely. a scratch in the paint? maybe. but real structural damage? nah.

It's the kind of thing where the organizers would probably point at the waiver and say they are not responsible.

But in a decent world, the person whose bike it was, the race organizers, and a local bike shop(especially if they sponsor the race), would all sit down and find a compromise to get the person back on the road without doling out too much cash. Of course people are never so level headed, so it'd be a shit storm instead.

I totally agree but I was just playing the worst possible scenario. .....I'm pretty sure that there were a few people with broken shifters and bent wheels.....It was a heck of a crash

even freakier would be the weird noises u'd/u'll hear from your wheels, spokes, BB, Brakes, whatevers.....once out on the road/course!!! (and the psych job u'd have to deal with, accordingly....)

Yeah it didn't seem good for anyone involved.....including the race organizers.....someone could've lost the race because of a small malfunction from that mishap

Bikes are not made of tinfoil.

Maybe you are on to something here....

s

Key word: Decent world.

This is America. ALWAYS somebody else's fault.

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The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Bent shifters, maybe. thise are easily remedied with an allen key. but broken and bent wheels? Highly unlikely. these bike parts aren't made of glass. I'm a mechanical engineer and I road race. bike parts can stand alot of abuse.

I understand we all have nice bikes, and I'd be pissed if an accident caused a scratch on my nice paint job. But c'mon, bikes are meant to be ridden, which means they wear out. if you don't want to stand the risk of your nice bike getting a scratch when shit happens, then hang it up on the wall and don't ride it.

Agree that bikes can stand up to a lot of abuse (mine certainly does with the number of kerbs and potholes I encounter on my daily commute!) but isn't the point that they're designed to withstand forces encountered from riding, not from something falling on them? E.g. a carbon fibre frame can deal with some pretty big forces and impacts when they're delivered through the wheels, bottom bracket or head tube, but if you have a sharp object you can knock a hole in a tube wall pretty easily?

I had a frame (Caad3, which admittedly was pretty extreme in the size of the tubes and the thinness of their walls) which survived a head-on collision at >25mph with no problems but got badly dented when it got knocked over and fell onto the sharpish edge of a toolbox. I could easily imagine some carbon bikes getting quite badly dented or even punctured by something like a pedal or a garmin or light mounting at relatively low forces.

I think the collective noise from pretty much everyone at the race once they saw the carnage, regardless if your bike was on that rack or not, would be the freaky sound

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

again....in ref to "funny noises psyching one out"....I did a 60km spin yesterday; had to stop n take a leak by some bushes/low trees near Sarasota bay. Placed my felt z95 (aluminum) up against a bush/tree. It fell over ever soooooo slightly up against young tree limbs (in comp to the crash/tumble described in this thread....); this is while I'm "letting loose," mind u (<---------Lady runner sees me, smiles.....nice....lol); I get back on my way/ride, and notice some kinda noise coming from FD/BB area (that I don't know how to describe....here) and I'm starting to wonder, "did I bend (slightly) my FD, get it out of whack, got shit in it, can't be my BB....no way..... or what?"

That's how shit happens sometimes. Even the smallest things, (Not just the "bigs") smallest incidents can wreak chaos (albeit....small-time variety here). And conversely, one can luck out in a major crash with hardly a scratch on them or bike. Am sure there are many experiences Riders here have shared, or could share attesting to BOTH sides of this OP's Thread intentions/discussion (of shit happening, and who's responsible for it....)

For the majority of situations? yes. Engineers don't design your bike to be fail-proof. That would be costly and unecessarily heavy. fact is these situations are RARE. A bike falling over from a rack would see pedals or derailleurs or handlebars hit the ground first. hitting a hard, Rigid unyielding surface at an angle would need to be a real freak accident.

Carbon bikes don't 'dent' or what engineers call yield. they fail, but at a much higher stress point than when aluminium will 'dent'. A properly designed bike falling onto a pedal from a bike rack will not puncture or dent a carbon fiber tube, and at most scratch the paint, because a pedal or a light mounting can 'turn' and hence your forces get dissapated. Carbon fiber is not the eggshell material people think it is- they make aircraft wings out of it, and there is much much much more at stake there than on your bikes. Remember that your bike receives lots more serious dings and knocks during shipping.- granted, properly packaged and in a cardboard box, but have you obeserved shipping procedures? they're not gentle on bikes.

if you wanted to break a bike in such a way, you could. I could probably devise a lab test to do it. but chacnes of it happening in real life would be minute.

Isn't the thing about carbon (and other materials for that matter) that it's all about how it's built out for a specific purpose? The fact that a carbon fibre plane wing can cope with a huge amount of abuse doesn't mean that a carbon fibre bike can, any more than the fact that I can crush an aluminium Coke can in my fist means that they shouldn't build planes out of aluminium. You certainly could (and in the past prior to UCI weight limits I think some companies did?) build a CF bike that is structurally strong enough to deal with riding forces but would be pretty vulnerable to any impact.

Totally agree that a single bike falling over and sustaining serious damage is highly unlikely. The forces involved in a whole rack of bikes falling over would worry me though - luckily my entire 4 bike portfolio could be replaced for less than the cost of a single superbike so I would be one of the least concerned owners in that scenario!

Yes it is. But engineers design things with a safety factor in mind, even with non-anticipated modes of loading. Certainly, the more you push the envelope of performance- weight, etcetera then yes, compromises are made in these areas, but your typical bike is nowhere near that envelope.

A typical safety factor would take the most extreme cases of usage and multiply it by 2 or 3, in some industries maybe more. I'm not saying failure is impossible, it's just highly improbable.

Here's a simplistic analysis: A bike rack is, probably at heaviest, 30kg? Ten bikes are maybe 90kg? Give the total 150 kg, tops.The failure strength of a single ply of carbon in its weakest mode of failure is about 80 mpa, which is 80 million newton's per meter square. This means that the above total weight falling one meter would need to be concentrated to a size of less than a hundredth of a meter square for just a single ply of carbon to fail, let alone a design that uses more plys or has multiple plys optimised in multiple directions. This also assumes your bike is rigidly fixed, with no possible means of sliding or something like that to absorb the energy. Possible? Well yes. Likely? No.