Needless to say the part that broke was the carbon outer plate. Not the alu knuckles, plastic pulley wheels, ti and alu bolts, or even the steel pivots. The carbon bit!

So I was a bit pissed, and replaced it with a decade+ old all aluminum campy Athena 8-speed mech, which worked perfectly with the 10-speed Centaur cassette and Record shifter, btw. I looked into replacing the plate, which was $150, and decided I’d be better off buying a used Record or Chorus mech anyway. After chasing a few of those around the Czech internets for a week or two, I gave up and settled for the old alu bit.

But after a couple of months of seeing this broken expensive piece of shit in my apartment, I decided to take some action. So I ground-up/filed-off some mixed length (0.5-10mm) fibers from the cutoff from a carbon cross fork, and went to work laying it up.

The knuckle has a brass(?) sleeve pressed into the carbon on either end, and a steel pivot rotates inside each sleeve. The sleeve is what broke out of the carbon, so I figured I’d put it back. With some good Czech epoxy and the carbon fibers and a little patience (luckily as that was all I had to spare), I had built up a nice reinforced gusset on the forward sleeve and realigned/repaired the contact points for the sleeve. It took a bit of twisting and prying to get it all back together even though it was 99% aligned, but it seems to be working now, so we’ll see.

repaired record outer knuckle

In the end I was pretty happy with how the carbon came together. A very little bit of finishing work with a small file, so I have a reasonable amount of faith in its durability. But don’t think I’ll be repairing any handlebars anytime soon though.

ouch!

ok, so I went for a short ride the other day to meet the misses after work, for a tool around on some city park paths. it turned pretty short, when on a steep little dirt climb my front wheel kicked up a piece or path debris (a stick or a rock, in the end I wasn’t able to determine which was the final culprit.)

It nicely struck my rear derailleur, which is of course a Campagnolo Record 10 with a carbon outer plate. And with enough force to push it pretty hard. And to an insult to injury, I will have to assume that I had not conservatively enough set the inner limit screw, as the impact was enough to send the carbon mech spokeward.



It grabbed a spoke, snapped the carbon loops off the pivot and bent my alu hanger/slider a bit. So I trashed what appears to be a $400msrp derailleur. I looked up the part number for the replacement carbon outer plate from campy and it’s like $150!!

Needless to say, I bent the hanger straight and put an old all aluminum 8-spd Athena that was in a car accident crash on, and shifting is back to perfect for the 2×10.

As an added amusement, when I flipped the bike over to see how the hell I was going to ride home (which was suprisingly not a problem as long as I didn’t try to shift or do any drops over 8″) I found that my no-good-drunk mechanic didn’t tighten my fancy campy record aluminum chainring bolts very tight. 2 were missing. 60% of them were there, though; and that’s passing.
He still gets a D for that one.

And I’m gonna stop paying him in bourbon and Pilsner Urquell