Ibis Tranny Carbon Test

A customer brought us her Ibis Tranny with a cracked rear triangle. She'd crashed pretty hard on some lava rock; the chain-stay was cracked almost all the way through on 3 sides. She continued to ride the bike for a month with little protest from the bike frame.

Once we'd swapped out her rear triangle (replacement courtesy of the Ibis warranty department), we decided to conduct some 'research' on Ibis' carbon lay-up.

Test #1
Jimmy, our service manager, weighs about a buck-30 dripping wet.



Not a peep out of the frame when he stood on the open end of it.





Test #2
Let's put a little muscle into this. Dave, one of our mechanics, weighs more than Jimmy. Like 70+ lbs more (that was a couple weeks ago--he's been hitting the gym pretty hard since). When The frame protested a little under Dave's weight--a creak, some flex--but didn't snap when he bounced up and down on it.



Test #3
Out came the ball-peen hammer. It took about 30 blows to the cracked area to get it to finally snap. Photos didn't do this test justice, but I think you can imagine how it went down.

What do we take away from this? Even you big boys don't have to worry about riding carbon hard. Santa Cruz is releasing its carbon V-10 downhill race machine this year. If that's not a vote of confidence, I don't know what is.