Damaged my brand new TCR Advanced frame by chain suck

Jimmy Walnuts wrote:

Pilot Pete wrote:

What is it with all this ‘seal it with nail varnish’? Why?

 

You really are a prime bell end. A patronising one too. Every post you make (on here or on BR) has a level of aggression and false superiority to it. Has your wife left you for a bloke with Super Record or something? And what’s with the signature? Grow up you t*t.

His solution is also not going to be within the skill level of most people. Getting a respray to decent finish on a large area like a door or wing is hard enough. Getting perfection on a small multi-coloured area way would more cost than the easiest solution which is seal the damage and forget about it.

What is it with all this

What is it with all this ‘seal it with nail varnish’? Why?

That is pure and simple chain suck, caused by the chain being dropped off the inside of the little ring and then dragged up the back of the inner ring against the frame.

You can just leave it, or if you want it aesthetically correct, get it repaired properly in terms of repainting. I cannot see for the life of me why you would want to take some wet and dry to it and then use nail varnish! What do people think they are achieving by doing this? 

If you know how to repair paint then fine, go ahead and do it. I’ve done plenty of repairing of paintwork on cars over the years and if you take wet and dry paper to it, you need to be doing it correctly otherwise you are just making a mess.

You take various grades of wet and dry, lower grades first to flatvthe area. This will mean you remove quite a lot of the paint all around the damaged area. You then use finer and finer grades to feather the paint edges. For a scratch that deep you will end up with an area about four times the size of the damaged area to feather the paint sufficiently.

You may need to build up the scratch with a bit of filler/ filler primer and then flat it again to get a smooth finish. Once you have done this you can then move onto respraying the area to match. This will require colour matching the paints, a spray gun or airbrush and accurate masking to achieve a descent renewal of the paintwork. After the paint has hardened it will require a lacquer coat to seal it and cutting/ polishing to achieve the correct finish.

What exactly will nail varnish achieve, especially if applied using a nail varnish brush? A gloopy mess. Why?

If you want it fixed properly and can’t do that yourself, pay someone with the required skills to do it for you, or just live with it. Bearing in mind it is behind the chainset it can hardly be seen as it is. A proper repair would not be that expensive.

PP

Trickier to do with carbon

Trickier to do with carbon frames than metal ones, but my bikes, where possible, have several thin zip ties around the chainstay to avoid exactly this.

Pretty sure I’ve seen self-adhesive stainless patches for this, too.

Funnily enough this story

Funnily enough this story sounds very familiar.

My TCR Advanced had chain suck when it was just a month or two old, took a lump of paint off the chain stay and I was very upset with it, but mostly myself as the rings were a little bit dirty which could have contributed (and I think I had also changed the cassette from 12-30 to 11-28 without shortening the chain, although that shouldn’t really matter).

Anyhow, put a bit of white insulating tape over the damaged areas (as luck would have it the paint was white….) and I’m still riding the bike now perhaps 5 years (and about five thousand miles) later without any issue, and I’ve killed a few other frames in the intervening period.

So yeah, I suspect the frame is completely fine, but in view of how new the bike is it might be worth reporting the damage to the bike shop and perhaps trying to get something in writing to confirm that this won’t effect the warranty/guarantee as there is no question of poor setup/maintenance (by yourself) being responsible at this early stage – you don’t want it to fail in a year or two and for them to try and blame you for letting the chain suck happen due to poor maintenance/whatever.

As above there are also numerous carbon repair shops that can fix the frame should it come to it.

Best of luck!

theraPi wrote:

theraPi wrote:

longassballs wrote:

I don’t care what anyone else says – I’d be taking it back to the shop for replacement or refund. For that to happen on a second ride is unacceptable and the fault of whoever set the bike up

Well the whoever person would be me actually, since I re-adjusted it before the first ride. 🙂 And I’m actually confident doing this, having built up my earlier bikes. Just have to learn proper shifting, apparently :(

AfterPeak wrote:

AfterPeak wrote:

Looking at the width (top to bottom) that looks too long to be a chain but there are two/three strips  down that look about chain link width apart. Almost looks like the damage has been done upwards not downwards.

Chain suck is upwards – the lower run of the chain sticks on the bottom of the chainring, usually as it is midway through changing onto the small ring, and gets carried upwards as the chainring rotates until it jams between the chainstay and chainring. Changing down at the same time as hitting a bump in the road is what can cause it. In the 1990s I had a Lemond OCLV, and it actually had a small curved piece of aluminium sheet bonded onto the chainstay with double-sided tape at that point so that if chainsuck happened, the carbon fibre stay was protected by the aluminium. But I can’t recall that it ever got called into action.

I have had chainsuck on a steel touring bike when shifting onto the granny chainring – the chain got quite firmly jammed and scraped some of the metal away on the chainstay, and I scraped a bit more away freeing the chain from where it was jammed so I could continue riding. When I got home I patched the paint up, and that bike is still in use many years later.