Buying Used - Bubble under clearcoat an issue??

[TimmyB]

All,

I've been helping a buddy of mine step up his roadbike. I found a carbon steelman on CL that looked promising, so he went and checked it out today. However, he noticed it had a couple bubbles under the clearcoat. Is this an issue? I had no idea and wasn't able to go with him to check out the bike to see for myself. Google didn't help out so much... or maybe by googlefu is weak. In any case, here's the cellphone pic he took:

http://i51.tinypic.com/2hxvj9l.jpg

What say you?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers, :beer:

Timmy Bolton

[rice rocket]

That's the clearcoat itself bubbling. Epoxy is incredibly stable, almost nothing will affect it (or remove it). Perfectly serviceable in my opinion (don't sue me, I have no money).

[TimmyB]

Promise there will do be no lawyers involved ;)

Thanks for your insight! What exactly do you mean by "serviceable?" Do you mean it'd be easy to fix/get rid of the bubbles? Or not worth the effort?

As a side note, to make a short story longer, growing up I worked in various jobs in the surf industry and was friends with some local shapers (surfboard makers). Now that I think about it, "support your local shaper instead of the overseas "pop-out" [machine made]" seems pretty similar to todays arguments for handmade/lbs instead of overseas/machine made. The point that I'm trying to get to is that one of the custom boards I got had a couple bubbles under the clearcoat and looked pretty darn similar to what I see in the pic my friend sent. My shaper assured me it was not an issue and it didn't turn out to be. Then again I DID snap that board :crap: . Anywho are bike clearcoats and surfboard resins the same then? I guess just in the context of epoxy resin?

[Louis]

The Kestrel EMS fork I have on my daily-driver has a few spots like that. As was stated above, I believe that they're just areas where the clear-coat has come off the underlying CF/epoxy. I don't worry about it - as best I can tell it's purely cosmetic and not worth dealing with.

[DRietz]

Poke it with a needle, flake away the bubbled epoxy, and paint a bit of clear nail polish on that baby.

Or just leave it that way.

[TimmyB]

Thanks for the info guys. Really appreciate it! :beer: