We just bought a used Cannondale Treadwell 3. It’s going to be a beater bike for my kid to ride to school and the pool. However what I thought were scuffs appear more serious. What causes paint to crack? This is a hybrid bike but who knows where/how the previous owner rode it. The fork doesn’t appear to be bent at all.
Can I just sand/prime/paint?
by Rough-Championship95
10 Comments
Wait wait wait that’s a bent fork, and you want to repair the paint??
That fork has been bent. It’ll “probably” not just snap, but unless there’s no choice, replacement is necessary
The reason in corosion. Best course of action is to strip the paint to bare metal remove the corosion and seal it with a primer. Then paint.
That type of cracking is caused by the metal bending. If it doesn’t look bent it may no longer be.. but it was bent. If it pulls to one side or steers weirdly twitchy, it’s bent. It’s sometimes tricky to see without a reference. If the fork seems sound I’d just scrape away the split paint, rough it up with steel wool and clear coat to prevent rust. No reason to go crazy painting it properly if it’s a beater.
Your bike has been in a crash. Return it to the seller if you can. Do not ride it
Can you post a side view, with the whole bike visible, from about waist height, not with the 0.5 zoom?
Your fork kinda looks bent, and that paint looks like it’s been bent and cracked. The mismatched lever, torn up grips, scratches bar, all suggest this bike has seen warmest a few crashes, maybe one bad one.
Those forks may be bent, but they’re steel. Good enough for trips to school/pool unless those trips involve step drops or flights of stairs. Or if your son is XL. I say send it. Don’t brother painting unless it starts flaking off en masse.
Oh man, they gave you the “parking brake” lever for an adult tricycle.
That is frame damage.
As others have said the fork is toast, but those are easy to replace- now it’s a good idea to check the frame. It’s probably okay but the bike bonked into a car or a wall or something at a decent rate of speed, and that puts a good amount of stress on the down tube and some amount of tension on the top tube. Feel for dimply waves and look for cracked paint on the bottom of the downtube, especially first few inches from the head tube. If the down tube is okay, the top tube should be okay too.
A hybrid frame should be overbuilt enough to withstand a fork bending accident, but especially with an aluminum frame- it’s good to check.
(There’s another old-school frame check you can do for completeness by running a string from a rear dropout, around the head tube, and back to the other rear dropout- keeping the string path as symmetric as possible- and the seat tube should be equidistant from the string on both sides. That’s for checking if the rear triangles are straight, which is probably much more an issue for steel frames than aluminum- but it’s an easy test.)