Our local friend and racer Alex Bremer has kickstarted what we think is a pretty cool business – carbon bicycle repair. With carbon fiber becoming a more and more prevalent material these days, it’s inevitable that things will break and need specialized repair services. Sometimes, mailing a precious frame 1000 miles away seems too daunting – or is simply too expensive. Alex’s firm, called BikeCPR, was started to help address the growing local need for a type of bicycle maintenance that isn’t uncommon – but is certainly very different from what we deal with here at IFixByx – structural failure.
We took a few moments to sit down with Alex last week and get an inside look at his new business.
IFB: We’ve seen your work come through the shop, but roughly how many
carbon repairs have you done to date? Is it mostly NYC based bike
owners or are you servicing a wider audience?
AB: I have done upwards of 30 carbon repairs, which started as something
of an experimental process. The first repairs were on frames that were
considered junk – so I could play around and develop my technique. One of
these was a bike with a severed top tube that I made whole again, and it’s
still in use, with thousands of miles on it! So even my first repairs were
very solid, but I was using the first repairs to hone the technique and
refine the finished product. Up until this fall, I have only done work for
friends and friends of friends in NYC and the northeast who have gone out of
their way to come to me. I’ve been performing high-quality
repair work for some time, but still using that network to experiment with materials, paint, and techniques. Now that I’m finally really happy with the consistent quality of the final product, I’m trying to bring people to BikeCPR to save their broken carbon stuff.
IFixByx: As a bike racer, applying your education in Mechanical Engineering to fixing carbon race bikes certainly makes sense – but did you head to school (Columbia University) with that in mind?
Alex Bremer: Not at all! I was really interested in architecture in high school,
and was pretty much convinced it was my career choice. I was inspired by
architect Santiago Calatrava’s background in engineering to pursue a
Mechanical Engineering degree as a route into architecture and design that
would be unique and valuable. I ended up getting a little distracted by
bikes, and I did my senior design project on bamboo applications using a
bike as an example. I got familiar with carbon fiber and fiberglass as part
of the project, since we made a bike out of bamboo tubes and bamboo
fiberglass lugs. It was only when my friend Tony broke his carbon frame that
I realized I had the background I needed to do carbon repairs, and that’s
where it started.
IFB: Do you foresee your business becoming a nation wide service?
Calfee seems to do quite well with their repair services. Is that a
goal?
AB: I expect that my business will be largely rooted in the Northeast.
Calfee is definitely at the forefront of carbon repairs, but their prices
range from about $300-$600 and the turnaround time is 6-8 weeks (both before
shipping). So there is room for me to offer a much faster, cheaper service
(especially when shipping is out of the equation for local customers).
However, there are also a handful of others in the U.S. doing the same thing
as BikeCPR, so it’s probably going to be hard to take
business away from a company in Colorado who has the local advantage. I am
realistic about what limits there are on the business and there isn’t a
final goal – I just want to see where it goes.
IFB: At this point, your work is mainly on repairing carbon frames,
but do you aspire to building your own carbon frames?
AB: Yeah, I would love work on my own frames. At the moment, BikeCPR just fixes
frames, rims, and other components. Some repairs
bring interesting technical challenges with them, but for the most part it
isn’t anything more than manual labor now that the process and technique
have been finalized. With my interest in design, I would be really excited
to start developing my business in more creative ways like frame
manufacturing, but its also a step-by-step thing for me. Making frames
requires a lot more investment, since you are creating from scratch a
complex structure with very specific symmetry and axes, as well as industry
standard threading and dimensions, etc… So that’s a dream at the moment
and not in the immediate future.
IFB: Finally, many argue that one carbon frame is better than another or you’ll hear phrases like “cheap-Chinese-carbon” frames thrown around. What’s your take on the varying levels of carbon quality and how does that affect your work?
AB: I definitely think that there are important differences in different
types of carbon. But I do think that some distinctions are more arbitrary,
since at its core, the strength of carbon doesn’t come from the individual
fibers, but from the effect of having a huge number of fibers (thin and weak
by themselves) applied in a certain direction or pattern. Bike stuff made in
Asia may have quality concerns for other reasons, so pinning a negative
label on the raw materials instead of the overall design and manufacturing
process doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
My opinion is that the most important qualities of carbon are:
a) the thickness of the sheet
b) the weave/directionality of the fibers.
For instance (I am thinking of rims, head tubes here, and other areas
facing a wide range of forces – lateral, vertical, etc) in some cases using a woven fabric can provide reinforcement that adds strength in 3-D, rather than against a
single angle of force or direction of torque. But then for other cases (e.g.
a top tube), using unidirectional fabric makes a lot more sense because the
range of the forces applied to the part is much narrower and predictable,
creating a sort of a simple theoretical problem that has an actual physical
solution. And so that using the same amount of unidirectional carbon
provides more strength against that specific type of strain on the bike than
woven fabric would have. Bike CPR uses a conservative
thickness of carbon to ensure that the repair will never break, and the
weave of the fabric is chosen on a case-by-case basis.
Thanks Alex! Best of luck with the new project.
[...] accessory repair service started by our friend Alex Bremer (see one of our recent posts about him here). We work closely with BikeCPR on any frames that arrive in our shop needing repair. Avoid costly [...]