Water in carbon frame…

Water coming out of seat tube after rainy ride, understand pretty normal, but what I’m wondering is is it going to **** my bottom bracket? i.e is the seat tube open to the bottom bracket?

who knows? Not all frames are the same.

Remove BB, check to see if seat tube is open.
If so, drill 5mm hole in bottom of BB for drainage.
Reassemble, ride, enjoy.

If you think the BB bearing joining tube O-rings will keep out water with a possible 400mm head of water, you may as well believe in Santa.

PaulD

I wouldnt drill a hole on a carbon frame, it’s asking for trouble and could crack the frame while riding, go to a good LBS and ask for advice.

If you think the BB bearing joining tube O-rings will keep out water with a possible 400mm head of water

More than likely – the parts involved are precision moulded and O-rings are used to seal similar parts to much higher pressures.

Most likely path for water ingress in normal conditions is via the bearing seals just behind the crank arms.

I wouldn’t drill a Carbon frame either 😯

I wouldnt drill a hole on a carbon frame, it’s asking for trouble and could crack the frame while riding, go to a good LBS and ask for advice.

The sky may well fall in…..not.

Most carbon frames have a drain hole drilled into the frame. My Addict does, and when the Trek OCLV frames started filling up with water, they provided a hollow bolt to hold the under-the-BB cable guide on.

Or, they advised just drilling a small hole to let the water out…

Hmm, 400mm head of water. Let’s assume 30.9mm seattube internal diameter. If it was full of water that would be just over 0.01m2 of water. If I hadn’t had quite a few cans if lager and it wasn’t nearly 10pm at night I’d work out how much that weighed. I know for one thing though that is sure as shit wouldn’t push past the o-rings on a BB.

Got bored had a look and remembered some stuff from school. A cubic metre of wet is 1 tonne so 0.01m2 is 10kg. A bit over 20lb. I think you’d notice if you were dragging that around with you.

I have emptied two cups worth of water from a carbon frame. I drilled it shortly afterwards.

Oh. I thought this was going to be a super bikepacking wheeze – how to carry water without any additional bottle cages.

Northernmatt: 10kg of water is 10 litres. Inside a seat tube? Really??? Or maybe the calculation went a bit adrift…

I think northernmatt is calculating area as pi*diameter^2, and has also slipped a place on his order of magnitude (that’s the trouble with trying to calculate volume in m3 using dimensions in mm). I make the actual internal volume of his theoretical seat tube to be 0.0003m3, hence only 300g of water.

Right. So I’d have to fill the top tube too if I wanted to do away with a water bottle or two?

On most modern bikes you’d be best off just using the down tube (it being longer and generally fatter than any of the others) and ignoring the seat tube for water storage purposes – the seat tube being somewhat diameter constrained. Hope that helps?

Take the seatpost out and turn the bike upside down as part of your post-ride maintenance routine???

OLD THREAD ALERT!! Another good reason for turning your bike upside down to fix punctures!!!!