trailer or panniers on a camping tour

[foxyrider]

I would not want to do this with modern ultralight carbon wonders with fancy wheel sets.
Willem

Why not?

there are plenty of reasons.

Another question might be 'why would you want to?' in the first place.

cheers

Maybe because i don't believe you need a 15kg bike to do the job? I have to say that the majority of my customers seem to feel the same way which given how many 'touring' / all-road bikes i sell each year is a big lump of the 'touring' population, at least hereabouts. (we do have a couple of climbs in these parts which might influence people!)

You say 'there are plenty of reasons' but you haven't given even one, I'm not being facetious, I genuinely would like to know the answers.

[foxyrider]

Carbon frames are very precisely engineered for expected loads, and this is outside the design envelope for many of such frames. An older heavier steel frame will be far more suitable.
Willem

I would be looking at either a single wheel trailer mounted on the axle/qr or qr mounted rack adaptor. Under no circumstances should you clamp stuff to a carbon frame, fork or even seat post!

Now given i'm not exactly svelte i think i should be more concerned from that score than something fitted to an axle?

[willem jongman]

I would rather do this with a two wheeler than with a one wheeler. A two wheeler keeps itself upright, and with a one wheeler you have to do that, through the frame and the rear triangle in particular. Mind you, I am all in favour of ultralight and fast. But the ideal bikes for that are steel audax type bikes or old school steel road bikes. Fit two small panniers on a rack and a bar bag, or a 24 litre Carradice Camper Longflap plus a 12 litre Berthoud bar bag and you are set to go.
Willem

[Vorpal]

You say 'there are plenty of reasons' but you haven't given even one, I'm not being facetious, I genuinely would like to know the answers.

The biggest reason is the way carbon transfers forces in a frame. Carbon strength is much more dependent on direction than metal. It's not a perfect representation, but if one thinks of it like wood... wood has quite good strength in the direction of the grains, but if it is bent or sheared across the grain, it breaks more easily. Pulling a trailer may introduce loads that will be across the 'grain'.

Also, the weak points in a carbon frame are where they join to the metal bits. I would not want to subject the joint betweeen dropouts and frame to the stresses that will be induced by pulling a trailer or mounting panniers.

I would only recommend touring with a carbon bike for someone who could travel lightly, say with a change of shorts, credit card and an emergency tool kit.

Are any companies making carbon touring bikes? That's probably a pretty good indication that the durability is insufficient.

Aluminum road bikes can often be adapted for touring, but I wouldn't try it with carbon fibre.

[Brucey]

reasons?

Well reasons to have a very lightweight carbon bike are that a) it is light, you might go faster up hills. b) if you break your tour and you have days without a load, these rides might be slightly faster, too. c) er, there is no c), aaahm oooot now.

Reasons not to;
a) the frame will be designed for a particular set of loads that may or may not be the ones you will put through it. I doubt there are many carbon frames where 'load lugging' was high up on the designer's wish list.
b) the wheels will certainly not be designed for touring loads
c) you might well not have enough clearance for suitable tyres,
d) if it fails you will probably get little or no warning, and repair options in the field are limited,
e) carbon is very easily damaged by careless handling/minor knocks. pleanty of tours have been completed on dented steel frames because of this kind of thing. Did I mention, repair options for carbon etc are limited?
e) you are touring, not racing, right? Is a small speed 'benefit' (if it is real) worth any significant risk of component failure? f) you are lugging a load; does saving 1-2kg or whatever really make much difference?
g) if you wind up using a trailer and a 'light' bike instead of panniers and a 'heavy' bike, guess which outfit is actually heavier (and slower, everywhere, because of the aero drag etc...) anyway?

When touring, IME, a small increase in speed does not radically improve your enjoyment. However bikes that are not reliable
and/or comfortable most certainly will spoil your enjoyment.

I agree with you in that you don't -for many touring purposes- need a 15kg bike; however you can have one which is significantly lighter than this, is already proven reliable/comfortable under the conditions of use, and is damage tolerant/can be repaired if necessary. None of these things is really true of carbon framed bikes at present.

cheers

[DaveP]

Geometrical considerations come into this as well, don't they?
Carbon fibre frames I've seen have all been road racing frames. I have no personal experience of these, but I'm given to understand that very sensitive steering and rigidity are to be expected while vibration reducing compliance is not.
Also, when I think of some of the places my bike has spent the night - well I wouldnt want to leave a flash carbon job there!

[foxyrider]

I can't remember mentioning wanting to go faster anywhere, fastes day on this years tour was a whopping 150km at wait for it.....24kph - more usually its closer to 20kph which is hardly burning up the tarmac!

Seems the ugly 'you can repair steel' bit has come up again, i don't want a bike i might need to repair! what a stupid argument for using something. Yes currently i agree there are no carbon frame tourers but its not strength thats the issue - think about carbon framed mountain bikes, they take more abuse than i'm ever likely to put a frame through. No its a production viability thing - you don't sell many 2grand tourers full stop, most of my customers have a £1000 budget! If someone wants to make one i'm in the market!

Vibration damping? Comfort wise carbon is several levels better than steel, its why we use carbon forks these days, they 'soak up' more vibration whilst keeping the stiffness desired for performance. In fact i would go so far as to say that my two current steel bikes (yep i ride steel too) a 531 machine and a lightweight Columbus sportive machine are both less comfortable than the hydroformed aluminium framed bike i used for six years (it was too costly to refit after being abused that long!)

Geometry i agree could be an issue - but only if you load the bike badly (i've experience of doing that!) and given i tour on 25c tyres anyhow tyre clearance is hardly an issue, a 100gram race tyre is but a heavier training tyre would do the job nicely just as they do for commuting. I actually like a bike that goes around corners and transfers my effort into forward motion so the non race sportive geometries work great for me and as the trip is to ride half a dozen or so quite technical passes, going around corners is quite important to me and anyway its only got a 72.5 head which is quite relaxed given my last steel tourer was 73 parallel.

I can see where extra lateral forces on the rear drop out could cause issues, so a boo boo for a trailer but on the other hand surely a vertical load on to the axle is only like me getting on after xmas? And i might be wrong but wouldn't those same lateral forces apply to a metal frame? oh i forgot, you can repair it after you've pulled the back end out, on the other hand frame builders are not exactly two a penny these days so for someone riding in europe i might as well pull the back end out of carbon as steel.

The wheel issue is a complete red herring as i'd use a traditionally built wheelset instead of 'race wheels', i'm not stupid, daft maybe, i'll concede that!

Maybe the envelope of knowledge here is being pushed to its limits?

[foxyrider]

I would rather do this with a two wheeler than with a one wheeler. A two wheeler keeps itself upright, and with a one wheeler you have to do that, through the frame and the rear triangle in particular. Mind you, I am all in favour of ultralight and fast. But the ideal bikes for that are steel audax type bikes or old school steel road bikes. Fit two small panniers on a rack and a bar bag, or a 24 litre Carradice Camper Longflap plus a 12 litre Berthoud bar bag and you are set to go.
Willem

Here's the rig i used in Germany this year, bike @10kg luggage @7kg, 18 days hotel accomodation.

Foxy, Walsdorf Hessen

[Vorpal]

Seems the ugly 'you can repair steel' bit has come up again,

Didn't Sheldon Brown say that, too? If the late, great Sheldon Brown said it, it must be gospel.

Yes currently i agree there are no carbon frame tourers but its not strength thats the issue - think about carbon framed mountain bikes, they take more abuse than i'm ever likely to put a frame through. No its a production viability thing - you don't sell many 2grand tourers full stop, most of my customers have a £1000 budget! If someone wants to make one i'm in the market!

I was thinking of the question in terms of touring with a carbon road bike, rather than on a carbon frame designed for touring (maybe because there aren't any ) But you may have something with regard to production viability. I imagine that the tooling is expensive, and if the market isn't there, a carbon tourer might cost rather more than £2000. On the other hand, people spend plenty on titanium frames, so I think that if someone were to design a carbon tourer, people would buy them.

A touring load puts different forces on a bike and through a frame than a person alone does. It's not just on the axle, especially if the bike sways a bit, goes around a corner or down a hill. Most of it is on the axle, but not all of it. I doubt that designing a carbon frame to withstand touring loads is an insurmountable problem, but it's not as easy as it might seem.

The shapes and sizes of people are fairly predictable (or can be 'defined' as design parameters). Once the design scope is established, a bike can be designed for a range (15th to 85th percentile weight for a given height, 15th to 85th percentile arm & leg length, etc.) of people and riding styles. How people load bikes, though, is less predictable. And once a bicycle is designed to carry a load, people will use it to carry the shopping or strap a parcel to the rack to haul it home.

Of course, it might be just that once a carbon frame is robust enough to put up with utility cycling, it's downright ugly.

I don't design carbon frames, and I'm no expert on the properties of carbon, but I am familiar with it's use in some other applications. I would not tour on a carbon frame unless it were specifically designed for touring.

[Brucey]

Seems the ugly 'you can repair steel' bit has come up again, i don't want a bike i might need to repair! what a stupid argument ....

well perhaps you had better not ride any bike then. They can all break or be broken, and it rarely happens at a convenient time. I have known quite a few people who have broken bikes and had to repair them whilst on tour, and many more who have wanted modifications, repairs etc done at home.

I still haven't heard any good reasons for wanting a carbon fibre touring bike, just a lot of talk about how it might be possible.

If it conferred some kind of compelling advantage, it might be worth trying.

But I don't think it does.

Rider weight, weight in panniers, and other loads passed into the frame all work slightly differently BTW. Bolting a 90kg weight to a frame (say) and running it on a bumpy roller/road is far more damaging through vibration than a rider of the same weight. Worse still is the same weight that is loosly bolted, i.e. able to rattle, like some trailer hitches do.

BTW Your experience with aluminium frames is quite normal; if they are remotely comfortable (which is unusual), they are often only fit for the bin after a few years (if they don't break first), same as many carbon forks. The 'plastic throwaway culture' that goes with this is both unnecessary and is the complete antithesis of why many people swing a leg over a bike in the first place.

If you want a bit of a laugh, try to find someone who can inspect a used carbon fibre component/bonded joint and warrant that it is fit for further use. Good luck! If you want an even bigger laugh, try and find someone who will make you a carbon frame to fit you, or repair one that is damaged. Have fun!

If your tour on 25mm tyres, and expect to be able to go round corners at crit speed even with a load on then you are in a small minority of tourists. There are lots of bikes out there (audax ones etc) which will do that job and not weigh a ton, and they don't have to be made of anything especially unusual to do it. I'm sure that a lot of people (most experienced tourists, in fact) will suppose that you could ride at the same speed as you normally do, but in considerably more comfort if you used different equipment than that. There are many touring bikes and other bikes with wider tyres that steer beautifully; if anything, better in tight turns than an average race bike.

You comments on the relative comfort and geometry of different frames I would query since 'columbus' and '531' cover a huge range of possibilities, barely any narrower than if you had said (say) 'steel'. There is considerably more to how a bike steers than the head angle, too. The comment about the frame geometry mysteriously 'transferring effort into forward motion' is priceless... it is the kind of meaningless drivel that is written by lazy incompetent journalists rushing to meet print deadlines.

If you talk to engineers who design bikes for a living, or the most experienced riders, it is exactly the kind of thing they tend not to say.

cheers

[Vorpal]

I still haven't heard any good reasons for wanting a carbon fibre touring bike, just a lot of talk about how it might be possible.

If it conferred some kind of compelling advantage, it might be worth trying.

One advantage of carbon fibre is vibration damping. With road bikes, some of that potential is sacrificed for weight, rigidity, and repsonsivenss. But I expect that a carbon fibre bicycle design with touring in mind could have excellent vibration damping properties.

[Brucey]

I still haven't heard any good reasons for wanting a carbon fibre touring bike, just a lot of talk about how it might be possible.

If it conferred some kind of compelling advantage, it might be worth trying.

One advantage of carbon fibre is vibration damping. With road bikes, some of that potential is sacrificed for weight, rigidity, and repsonsivenss. But I expect that a carbon fibre bicycle design with touring in mind could have excellent vibration damping properties.

Fair point, I think you are right, you could make something with better properties in that regard.

But.... do many people really require or desire this? Most people seem happy enough with wide tyres if (road) vibration needs to be reduced, and (asides from a few people who are unsually sensitive) few bother with grab-on, sprung saddles, gel-filled mitts or any of the hundreds of other inexpensive vibration mitigation solutions.

For bigger bumps suspension is a reasonable idea; however I note that designs that use flexing members (of CF or Ti, typically), despite the attraction of fewer pivots, less weight etc are nothing like as popular as you might expect. I've ridden often on full suspension MTBs and they can be great. I've also ridden many thousands of miles on 'softail' MTBs and that system does work rather well too; however I've never really felt any urge to have something similar on a road bike or a touring bike; it comes with a cost, a cost you pay when the forces get a lot higher than normal, I think, e.g. when riding out of the saddle or lugging a load.

We've never had it so good, tyre-wise; there is a better selection of wide, low rolling resistance tyres available today than there ever has been before. Whilst tyres are so good, so simple, and so tweakable, yet 'frame flex' of the sort that might perhaps reduce vibration is wont to add extra problems when load-lugging, I remain somewhat sceptical about the use of different materials, for vibration damping on touring bikes, anyway.

cheers

[Vorpal]

I still haven't heard any good reasons for wanting a carbon fibre touring bike, just a lot of talk about how it might be possible.

If it conferred some kind of compelling advantage, it might be worth trying.

One advantage of carbon fibre is vibration damping. With road bikes, some of that potential is sacrificed for weight, rigidity, and repsonsivenss. But I expect that a carbon fibre bicycle design with touring in mind could have excellent vibration damping properties.

Fair point, I think you are right, you could make something with better properties in that regard.

But.... do many people really require or desire this?

Maybe not, but they certainly talk about it enough.

[willem jongman]

Let me be clear. I never questioned the possibility to design a carbon touring frame, or the specific advantages of carbon, such as vibration camping. All I did was argue that carbon frames can be designed and are designed much more precisely for expected loads than can be with steel or aluminium. The designer can really put the strength where it is necessary, and save on material where it is not. This also means that there is less margin (because less waste) in the direction of loads for which the bike was not initially designed. If you have ever ridden with a loaded trailer you will know that the forces on the rear triangle are different from normal riding, and quite strong.
Rider weight is a somewhat similar issue. Professional road racers are mostly small and light, and their frames are designed accordingly. Put an 85 kg rider on such bikes, and add another 10 kg luggage, and you are very likely outside the design parameters. Remember, these bikes are so great because they are so efficient: nothing is wasted. That also means there is little margin beyond the design parameters.
Willem

[reohn2]

Let me say first off ,I've never used a trailer on a bicycle.OK that said,from an observation POV, thinking what looks "right" and what I suspect would feel right,if I ever thought of buying a cycle trailer for touring it would be an Extrawheel.
I'd completely discount any two wheeler for two reasons,1) turnover risk 2)width,which kills the advantages of manouverability and the versatility of the narrowness of a two wheel bicycle.
The BoB trailer never looked "right" with the wheel at the rear putting all the weight forward of it onto the rearwheel,never quite understood that concept at all
The Extrawheel puts the weight where it should be,just forward of the trailer wheel giving a leettle nose weight and due to being articulated looks IMV very manouverable.
Also it can have the same sized wheel as the towing vehicle which keeps spare tyres and tubes to a minimal.
It also uses bicycle panniers for the load which can be used without the trailer and I reckon with a bit of fettling could also take a small dry bag on top too.

Carbon Fibre framed touring bikes are available but the thing that kills it stone dead as a touring bike material IMHO is its low resistance to impact damage,it doesn't dent,it fractures.