Spending part of my vacation trying to get the glue off my 808’s. acetone and goof-off sorta work but when I use my wife’s hairdryer, the heat seems to help soften up the glue to the point where you can kinda scrap it off. I was wondering if a heat gun would be even better at it but was curious to know if there is any risk to the carbon?
Heat can destroy the carbon. Behind me I have a full carbon rear wheel that was destroyed by heat from braking down a long descend in France this summer. Obviously my customer did not know how to apply brakes on descends and learned it the hard way.
I use a plastic tire lever for removing the glue… Or i used to do. Now I only ride on clinchers, because I honestly can’t be bothered to spend hours scraping glue off tubular wheel sets until my thumbs are numb. I had both Fulcrum Racing Speed and DT Swiss RRC 46 carbon tubulars and both where absolutely excelent wheelsets.
Why work so hard to remove the glue? It’ll help hold the next tire you put on. Use something plastic to scrap off as much as you can, then leave the rest.
Just to clarify… it is not the carbon fiber that can’t handle the heat, it is the resin system in the composite structure (the glue) that shouldn’t be exposed to heat (including friction) for long periods (typically 160F or higher).
What dictates the service temp of the composite structure (bike rims, wheels, bike frames, golf shafts etc… including aircraft components) is the cure temp of the resin system. “Higher cure temp, higher service temp”.
CJ
to expand on this a bit… …unless the glue is flaking off or has large clumps, you should just even/smooth out the existing layers and leave the rest on the rim (unless there’s say 20yrs worth of glue)
Thanks. I’ll use the hair dryer sparingly - Zipp says you can use it to remove the decals so the risk must be low. After removing the old tire (bought rims/tires used), (which took about an hour and left me with blisters on both thumbs - next time razor blade!), the remaining glue was a mess, lots of clumps. Since I won’t be riding these wheels until April, lots of time to get the rims nice and clean.