Fixable? Beloved beater frame crack

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  • Hello all, seeking advise before my trustly Lotus gets retired to the great scrapyard in the sky...

    After foolishly lending to a friend... It came back in a rather sorry (cracked) state... Fuck knows what happened there...

    Besides the cracks around the lug I presume the folk/steerer surely must be bent, though not super obvious from just viewing the bike side on? The top tube also shows a small amount of cracked paint on the top side, so I presume again must be very slightly bent/received a lot of stress from the crash, though not particularly visible and lug is still all sound.

    Basically wondering on repairability, even on a bodge, weld it up level? The bike is not really worth anything apart from in sentimental terms but I thought it was worth punt before it's condemned

    Any advice or interest from budding metal workers very welcome

    Cheers


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  • That doesn’t look worth fixing unfortunately. It looks like your pal was in a front end crash. If it was just bent, you could probably slip a stout bar through the bottom bracket like they did in the old days, feet either side and pull the forks forwards again. I wouldn’t risk that with the crack in the head tube.

    I have tried to bodge-straighten a frame like that by pie-cutting the tubes and MIG welding them but it didn’t work well because the downtube gets compressed in the crash and you have to shorten the top tube quite a lot to match it back up. I mean, you could drill a hole at each end of the crack, vee it out, run a weld over it and see if you can pull the forks forwards enough. It’s just a question of whether it’s worth all the effort.

  • Don't risk it . strip it for the parts.
    Keep the frame as a wall hanger or use it s a turbo trainer bike.

  • Thanks for the wisdom @Jonny69. Yeahhhh oh well... as I kinda figured, she's a gonner.

  • Who's got a sweet ass, scruffy, 56 steel frame with decent clearance I can buy????

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Fixable? Beloved beater frame crack

Posted by Avatar for grog @grog

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