A Look at Carbon Repair with Ruckus Composites

I first heard about Ruckus Composites in the summer of 2021.

I had crashed hard, impacting the carbon in my downtube, and my local dealer told me that my frame was likely compromised. This was during the height of COVID-related bike shortages and replacement frames were not readily available. I was up a creek without a paddle in sight.

Fortunately, a friend directed me to Ruckus Composites, a carbon repair business with a good reputation. I was a little hesitant at first. Many years of riding bikes and working in shops had given me the impression that once carbon cracks, it's time to shop for a new frame.

As it turns out, that conventional wisdom was incorrect. Carbon repair has been a well-established field in many industries for nearly half a century. Ruckus is just one of many facilities that can repair carbon fiber.

I sent my frame down to Portland, OR to be fixed. A month later my former death trap of a cracked frame was back in my hands. Ruckus fixed it for roughly 20% of the cost of a crash replacement frame and got it back to me quicker than the lead time on a crash replacement.

Here I am piloting it down one of the roughest enduro courses I have ridden.

To put raw numbers on the savings of carbon repair, Ruckus has a flat rate of $450 to repair a frame (though getting it repainted will cost more).

Going the replacement route is far more expensive. For example, a 2024 Trek Slash carbon frameset costs $3,899. Even with Trek’s 20% crash replacement discount, replacing a broken Slash will set the customer back $3,100, about 6 times the cost of repairing it.

I sold my repaired bike a few months later to get my hands on something with more modern geometry, but the successful repair stuck with me, and from what I’ve heard, it’s still holding up fine for its new owner.

If I was able to save money with such a cost-effective repair, why don’t more people do it? Why is carbon repair not widely promoted in the bike industry?

To answer those questions, I first needed to understand how carbon repair worked. I got on the phone with Shawn Small, the founder of Ruckus Composites to learn about the repair process.

The Story of Ruckus

Shawn followed in the footsteps of his entrepreneur parents and founded Ruckus in 2008, a couple of years after earning his mechanical engineering degree. Initially, he wanted the company to fabricate specialty bike components but struggled in that area. “I’m not the best at selling stuff,” Shawn told me. “I don't like selling product, to be honest, it’s not my thing.”

Instead, word got out that Ruckus was willing to repair broken carbon. By popular demand, the young company soon found a niche in repairing carbon bike frames. “I didn't really think about that as the viable shift that the business needed to take, but you know, we just kind of let it happen naturally.”

Since then, according to Shawn, Ruckus has repaired around 10,000 bikes. Ruckus has also expanded into repairing composites in other industries, working with everything from camping equipment to aerospace parts. At this point, they now repair about 1,000 frames a year but bikes make up only half of their business. The rest of the time, Ruckus is busy inspecting and repairing aerospace parts and doing R&D for the wider outdoor industry.

Ruckus has also found a niche in painting bikes and can match the factory colors and decals on any frame they repair. See US Cyclocross National Champion Clara Honsinger's frame with a custom paint job courtesy of Ruckus. Thankfully they didn't have to repair any carbon.

To help me understand the process, Shawn dove deep into Ruckus’s methods of carbon repair.

Diagnosis

To start, Ruckus performs an inspection, relying heavily on ultrasound technology to determine how to repair a compromised frame. Watch Shawn back up the age-old quarter test with an ultrasound machine below.

“What we do is we take the ultrasound machine and we go back and map out the damage size and depth and location, we get the composite information and we basically get to fill in the missing holes of the story of how the bike is made. And it clearly defines our repair area or how big our repair area needs to be.”

The repair process is very precise. Most carbon bike tubes are about a millimeter thick which leaves very little room to work with. Ruckus follows strict Federal Aviation Administration procedures to repair the carbon layup on bikes.

"When something's cracked all the way through, it's a little harder to work with, so we have to get a little creative." -Shawn Small, Ruckus Composites

“We follow a very straightforward repair process where [we] actually sand out the damage per given angle. You know, that's where you’re actually like scarfing down the material to kind of create this nice step. What you're doing is trying to get out all the damaged material and just kind of prep the area for new material”

Though this is a simple step when only the upper layers are damaged, it gets tougher when the damage goes deeper.

“When something's cracked all the way through, it's a little harder to work with. You know, there's no rigidity or structural integrity at that point [to] work with, so we kind of have to get a little creative. We do a process that is some of our intellectual property here where we stabilize the area. [It’s] a very clean and structurally sound method to start building that area back up.

Materials

After that, we lay up all-new prepreg materials [carbon fiber that has been “pre-impregnated” with resin]. We don't use any wet layup here, we get all our own pre-preg custom manufactured. I think we're the only people doing that. It's a little extra, it costs us a lot of money to do that, but it saves us a ton on labor and [it provides] quality and better performance.”

I pressed Shawn further on the benefits of spending more on the front end for the best material. He confirmed that the choice also helps minimize human error laying up the carbon.

“Having a tightly controlled material with Material Data Travellers helps alleviate any mysteries! We keep our Prepreg frozen and tracked for every batch when we batch cut it and bag it. As you said, the Production Environment needs Standard Operating Procedures and LEAN [a set of manufacturing principles focused on efficiency] to help produce consistent and timely outputs.”

With this custom-made fiber, Ruckus can get standard modulus carbon (an industry term for carbon with normal stiffness) in their unidirectional and twill (woven) material, both of which Ruckus uses to repair bike frames.

“We use both Unidirectional (UD) and twill in our repairs. We use UD as our primary reinforcement during repairs and a twill top layer. The twill's woven aspect helps mitigate any future impact damage as it's mechanically interlocked. We also design it to have a specific resin content on the top side for secondary finishing steps.”

One factor working in Ruckus’s favor is how similar manufacturing processes are across the bike industry. Shawn says that carbon layup methods and fiber angles on bikes are quite standard between brands. This uniformity helps Ruckus standardize their process of repairing frames.

The Fix

When the damaged area is prepped and the custom material is cut, it's time to begin the repair.

“[At this point] we lay up all the material. I'll do prepreg and then we can form it down [which is] all process controlled. So we monitor the vacuum, we have a digital log, and it would pull down to 0.4 millibar, which is 99.9999% vacuum. And what that does is that blows out any excess air, or any bulk out of the composite material, and then we run it through a program heat cycle. And what the heat cycle does is it essentially melts out the epoxy that's in the prepreg and it forms it all in the bike under heat and pressure. And then it cures in a couple hours, according to our heat cycle.”

"The heat cycle essentially melts out the epoxy that's in the prepreg and it forms it all in the bike under heat and pressure." -Shawn Small

Essentially this process infuses new material into the frame rather than putting band-aid material over any damage. In human terms, it’s like repairing a bone rather than throwing a cast over the damage.

After Shawn's team repairs the damage,  customers have the option of paying a bit extra for Ruckus to repaint the frame. While some customers like the look of the raw fiber, many take advantage of Ruckus's painting skills and spring for the color-match add-on. "My painter has been with me almost eight and a half years and he could match literally any bike out there," Shawn told me proudly.

A Question of Confidence

Still, anyone who has experienced a carbon bike failing catastrophically may have understandable reservations about hopping on a repaired frame. Shawn assured me, however, that properly repaired carbon frames are completely safe. Ruckus offers a lifetime warranty against defects in the repaired area.

According to Shawn, as long as carbon is repaired correctly with proper process control, the repaired carbon should be as strong if not a little stronger than the original layup.

Process control is where Shawn believes Ruckus sets itself apart. Ruckus works in compliance with ISO certification guidance and has their own testing equipment where they perform 350 different tests to experiment with different stress cycles. Though repaired bikes pass ISO testing in the lab, Shawn could not give me empirical data about the success rate in the field, given the many confounding variables outside the lab such as trails and riding style.

As an additional stamp of approval, Shawn says that 12 bike companies have contracts with Ruckus under non-disclosure agreements to do warranty work.

It is important to note that carbon repair will most likely void the frame’s warranty. With that said, if a rider’s frame is already compromised, a warranty is likely to be low on their list of concerns. Still, some customers might value the warranty, which protects against defects, enough to buy a replacement frame.

Shawn’s years of repairing bike frames have given him a unique perspective on how build quality in the bike industry has been improving. For example, the shift from quick-release hubs to through axles in both mountain and road bikes has drastically reduced the number of frame failures at the dropouts.

In addition to the cost savings of repairing carbon, an upside of carbon repair is its environmental benefits. Even shipping a frame across the country to Portland to be repaired has a much smaller carbon footprint than buying a new bike that was manufactured in Asia. In a 2021 in-house environmental review , Ruckus determined that repairing a frame emitted 9.3% of the CO2 that it would take to replace the frame and 2.7% of the CO2 it would take to replace the whole bike.

Drawbacks

To this point, everything Shawn has described makes carbon repair sound like a silver bullet. I asked him why this technology was not widely touted in the industry.

"We can cut off the whole front half of a bike and put another half together if you really wanted us to." - Shawn Small, Ruckus Composites

One problem with carbon repair is that it is not always financially viable. Shawn said that Ruckus could repair just about anything. “We can cut off the whole front half of a bike and put another half together if you really wanted [us] to do, you know, it's not a big deal.”

The problem is that the labor costs of complicated repairs make the process financially unviable. Parts like a headset interface or a wheel drop out, which Shawn calls “control surfaces”, have to be machined incredibly precisely. Repairing such surfaces requires a tiny margin of error, and is a very labor-intensive process that requires Ruckus to quote for time and materials beyond the flat rate. Shawn says these extra human hours swing the calculus. When a repair cost is close enough to the price of a crash replacement frame, it makes sense for most consumers to just replace the frame.

Similarly, repairing something like a carbon wheel, which is designed to withstand impacts under spoke tension, is not worthwhile when laying up a relatively simple circular rim is cheap.

Another obstacle that Ruckus faces is repairing an area where carbon bonds to aluminum, like a pivot or a bottom bracket. “[For] us and every bike company…bonding metal and carbon is seriously, monstrously hard. It's hard to even go down that black hole.”

Bike brands also have their own motivations not to endorse carbon fiber repair. A big factor is the obvious incentive from a company to sell more bikes. But profit-seeking is not the only motive for bike companies to shy away from recommending carbon repair. There is a huge variation in the quality of repairs.

When carbon repair can mean anything from your buddy messing around in the garage with carbon sheets and a hair dryer to a professional facility like Ruckus that has half a million dollars invested in ultrasound equipment alone, bike shops and warranty departments are understandably hesitant to endorse the process across the board.

An Exciting Future

For some companies, this is beginning to change. We Are One has an official carbon repair program at its facility in Kamloops, BC, where they can repair their own carbon bikes in-house. Of course, WAO has the advantage over most large brands of manufacturing in North America, and making a relatively small number of frames. Without a North American manufacturing presence, many other brands would have trouble creating a similar program, and scaling brings its own set of challenges.

If there were a certification board to approve carbon repair shops, perhaps brands would begin to publicly endorse carbon repair. If there were a way to repair a broken frame with the approval of the manufacturer and keep the original warranty, it would be a huge step for the bike industry.

There are many factors to consider when deciding whether carbon repair is right for you. Shawn says that the most important consideration a consumer should make is where they get the work done. Getting carbon repaired at a high-quality establishment, whether it is Ruckus or one of their competitors, will make all the difference in how reliable the frame will be. At the same time, he emphasized that people should be wary of any repair that seems too cheap. “You get what you pay for, in a bad way,” Shawn told me.

If you one day find yourself with a broken bike that is not covered by warranty, getting it repaired could be a reliable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly option.