Badly dented or how i surrendered my addiction...

[Inigo Montoya]

hmmmm, it started with me skipping through the local ebay auctions yesterday. one auction immediately cought my eye. a grey yeti arc from a guy close to me. called him and one hour later i was the owner of a heavily pimped alloy goddess from durango. :shock:
so what was i to do with that bike? thought about splitting it up - i need some of the parts for other projects - and selling the rest. no way. i'll most likely never ever have the possibility again to ride such a bike. so today i decided to build it up and keep it for now.
there is one big issue though on which i'd like to have your opinion. the frame is badly dented :cry:
i attached some photos that show them. especially the dent at the down tube (see yeti-arc-dent3.jpg) looks intimidateingly huge. how save is it to ride that frame? is there a way to repair it?
thanks!

 

[Kona Paul]

I'm definetely no expert, but if you're only riding light xc and not doing anything too crazy, I can't imagine it's terribly unsafe. It doesn't seem to be in a critical stress point on the tube (I'm guessing...again, no expert), as it's not near a weld. I wouldn't go as far as to say it can't snap, but I think you'd have to push it pretty hard to do that. As well as riding style, your weight could also be a factor to take into consideration. I'm a feather weight, and probably couldn't break a frame made out of dry spaghetti...

That's my humble two-cents worth, but hopefully a more knowledgeable person will confirm or destroy my theory.

 

[Inigo Montoya]

I'm a feather weight, and probably couldn't break a frame made out of dry spaghetti...

thanks for the joke and your opinion!!

 

[Kona Paul]

No problemo! I'm really pretty sure it's safe for light xc (no drops and jumps for sure), but don't want the guilt if it breaks under you... Thus my caution. I'm also not there to physically see it and touch it. At the very least you can make a cool SS commuter. Dented frames are great for that, and they get a new lease on life.

PS at 60 kg I'm not even sure it's a joke...he he.

 

[Inigo Montoya]

good point about the weight btw.
i'm ~75kg.

 

[Kona Paul]

That's not so heavy, so weight shouldn't be an issue. That leaves riding style. Most of my friends ride primarily xc, but some ride harder than others and just seem to push their bikes more. The guy I ride with every week weighs about the same as you, and even though we ride the same trails, it seems he can smash just about anything on his bike (except the frame luckily.) Our friend is a mechanic and we always have a good laugh about what's broken "this time!" One of friends managed to snap the down tube on his steel Voodoo, but he rides pretty hard (North Shore on a hardtail with 2 meter or more drops...he's pretty talented on a bike though and can ride anything. We hate him :evil: ) I think you'll be good if you aren't a maniac, but would still like to hear what some others have to say.

You should put up some pics of the whole frame just so we can get a look at it as a whole, and not just for the dents.

 

[FairfaxPat]

Is that frame Aluninum?

 

[Kona Paul]

It is.

 

[FairfaxPat]

If that was a steel frame, it would be fixable. About 25 years ago I had an Eddie Soens chrome plated track frame with a large dent in the top tube. My friend Joe Breeze fixed it for me with a unique method. Since the top tube was mitered and welded to the seat tube at one end and the head tube at the other end, it was sealed. Joe drilled a small hole in the top tube and proceded to fill the top tube with oil. Next he tapped and inserted a grease fitting for a car in the hole. Lastly he took a heavy duty grease gun filled with the same oil and attached it to the grease fitting and pumped until the dent popped out smooth from the inside hydraulicly! It was so smooth the chrome was still perfect!

 

[Kona Paul]

That's absolutely ingenious! I'm not very mechanically inclined, so love reading stuff like that. Also why I hang out at my friend's bike shop and get to see little ingenious solutions to things that I would never have thought of in a million years.