Hello,

I managed to have a decent sized rock jump up and batter my downtube on my Anthem at the weekend – it put a few small dents in the downtube, one which is about 5mm circle, and about 1mm deep, it’s on the edge of the downtube, facing left and down – and the paint around that area has a horizontal crack in it, with some fracturing emmitting out from the area.

The force to the downtube wasn’t that much, but… is this gonna be the paint cracking due to the aluminium being bent near the impact, or is this gonna be the frame cracking itself?

I’ll get some photos up to better illustrate the dent and paint damage as soon as I can.

Cheers chaps

Ricks

Yes, absolutely.

I have a number of these on the downtube of my Remedy, nothing to worry about apart from the aesthetics.

To expand on that, steel and aluminium sheet that thin (and tubes are essentially curved sheets) tends to bend rather than crack on impact. Cracks tend to happen where the material is thicker, such as at the welds, or as a result of fatigue (but that also tends to happen at the thicker points as it’s the high stress points where fatigue is concentrated). I’d probably only worry about a dent if was deep enough to encourage buckling.

Ever shot a coke can with an air pistol?

Paint is not very flexible and the layers tend to stick to each other far better than they stick to metal, so when the metal bends, the paint flakes off.
It’s quite common to see big flakes of paint peeling off accident damaged cars where the metal has bent and the paint has tried to hold it’s shape.
If the frame was cracked, which is highly unlikely, you’d probably have anew creaking sound from the area as well.

It’ll be the paint. Graham has it spot on. We do impact testing and flexibility testing on paint systems and the paint always fails before the metal with impacts IME.

IF you are really worried take a sharp knife and carefully flick off the paint at the crack and expose the metal. You can touch it up with clear nail varnish. You’ll make it look much worse though.