• I’d be looking for a refund too, but I don’t think your original question is a concern.

    Tubes come ready heat treated and are then assembled into a bike frame. There are no issues welding the “already heat treated” tubes together, so there’s no issue welding something onto a tube that’s now part of a frame.

    What doesn’t happen is weld a bunch of tubes together and then “heat treat” the resulting frame!

    Apologies if I’ve completely missed the point here....

  • I'm not sure this is correct. The process of welding tubes stresses them, i.e you apply a lot of heat and the alloy crystalises unevenly on each side of the weld. Annealing the metal by heat treating the frame post construction evens this back out, reducing the risk of it cracking at the weak points.

    Some alloys (the lower end stuff) have a far lesser risk of cracking this way, but they're heavier and thicker tubes anyway. Higher end i.e 7000 grade, is the thin suff that needs post-welding annealing to de-stress. Which is exactly the opposite of what you're saying I think...

    Also, welding itself has to be done without introducing impurities into the welds, hence TIG using inert gas. So again, doing any supplementary work on a frame after re-stripping it, increases the risk of both if not done under the same conditions as original manufacture. Not impossible, but still, a risk.

    If we were talking a Cannondale they would replace as a matter of course, it's not worth the time or risk to do a repair they can't guarantee in the same way as a new frame. Buying custom should mean getting better service and product than OTP, not worse imhop...

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