of the repair and we went ahead and let this dry for a full 24 hours

so we just removed it from our drying rack, we're gonna go ahead now and

take our clamp off, that's where we know we finished the job. If you happen to use

a tape or another type of clamp, we're just going to go ahead and remove that

the main objective here is just to hold the compression tape so that it doesn't move

as your compressing it. And it doesn't unwind itself, that's all.

Start removing it. So you can see that

our tape actually broke a little bit while we're taking it out so

this is a common thing that happens with this tape sometimes because

it's so

brittle it cracks when it's under high compression like that

so I'm just going to go in with a little razor blade here and pop that back out

it's not usually too big of a deal

When you do this just make sure you get all of it

sometimes you'll miss like a little section of it and then I'll actually it won't lay

won't come all out properly

Another little trick here is you want to basically put perpendicular force

when you're unwrapping

so you just want to keep this nice and taut, so that when you pull up it actually pulls up

all of the fiber. But everything looks really good we've got a nice seam

on the bottom here where the carbon came back together

it looks solid and we can go ahead now and

just really simply give it a

little squeeze and to make sure that everything hardened, and it did, it's solid

and we can just do a quick little coin test here

there's no dead spot, I mean, the pitch changes slightly but

it's not, we're not seeing that drastic

change that we did before so we know it's a pretty solid structure

We now went ahead and unwrapped everything, so we're just going to go ahead and

sand it. In this case I'm starting just

a very little bit of some of our 120 that's left over, I'm going to come in here and just kinda

just get some of the big stuff out real quick and then I'll come in with the 220

and then finish this off with the 320 .

One of the things to make sure, like to talk about before, making sure the area is nice

and wet. You don't wanna this dry, you don't want to get the carbon air born. Trying to keep this

nice and clean it also let's the sandpaper last a lot longer.

So again, like I showed you guys before, just going to give it a couple little sprays here

and then spray the sandpaper

and that's it. We're ready to go ahead and start sanding

We're also gonna go ahead now and

flip this over so we can get the bottom side nicely

and I'm probably just about done now

with my 120. It's not perfectly smooth but it's pretty darn close

I'm now we're gonna come in with our 220 in a minute

here, once I get this little roughness out of the bottom

done well and then we'll smooth this out for the final ... Once we

do that, once we get this 120 and get this little area in here cleaned up

just a little bit of left over epoxy and stuff, we'll go ahead and do it with the 220

and then we're gonna go ahead and unwrap this area and clean up any of the excess

material around it

to make sure you got a nice clean repair area and we're ready for finish. The sides look pretty good

here

we can see there's a little bit of carbon that's going up over that electrical

tape area

and that's fine it's not gonna stick to it very well so once we unwrap it

we'll clean up that edges and that's what we're gonna use that

320 for , we might touch it with a little bit of 220...and if you did this all right

this sanding area, you should be able to do in about 10 to 15 minutes of

sanding. It shouldn't be too much, if you're needing to do any more than that

and you're ruining, you're taking off too much of the repair area you

are gonna have to rewrap it and do it again and just

the more you do it you know the better you get at this and the better prep work

you do

the better your finish is gonna come out....So we're gonna go ahead and unwrap this

now...I just like to wipe this thing down a little bit, just so that we don't get

splatter mess everywhere

that's a good sign, we actually don't have any epoxy that came through the top layer

which is awesome. You don't really need to double wrap it the way I do, I

just do it because every now and then epoxy can get through

We typically at the shop, when we do

repairs, we're vacuum bagging, so we don't really have these problems

but at home most you don't have a full vacuum setup

so it's a lot more difficult. This is a really good

setup at home, or someone starting out and actually get

real good quality results with

a pretty simple toolset. So you can see here there's a little bit of

taping residue that's still on here, but we're gonna go ahead and be able to remove

this no problem

so again we're just gonna wet the area a little bit

go ahead and wet the sandpaper a little bit, it's also sometimes an easy way to clear out your sandpaper

By just spraying it

It'll actually clear out the paper so you can use that same piece for a lot longer

Now we're trying

to focus a little more on the ends here where we had that tape line

just to make sure that you have it nice and smooth...we're gonna sand out all that

decals there. And then the only other thing that we're gonna have to

deal with here is just removing all these decals now this is where you're

start getting into

the overlap of the finish and the sanding here

The repair itself is done, it looks pretty smooth

if your gonna send this out to a painter have a painter do this for you

to do the final finish work your gonna want to sand this down with the

320 and get all the little imperfections out

just have a nice smooth surface and they'll be ready to go ahead

most painters here can actually recreate this decal on the seat tube for you pretty easily

so we're done now ready to finish

There you go

We've now gone ahead an finished the repair. We've also done our final sanding

on the job. We've gone ahead and unwrapped the entire frame

and we can take a closer look at what the bike looks like now and come up with all of our finishing options

In this particular case, we could easily remove the entire decal

and clear coat it and it'd look pretty good. We probably wouldn't really notice anything

wrong

with the bike. You could also go ahead and have a painter recreate this

decal for you in paint and paint the whole frame and then clear it.

You could also have a vinyl shop possibly just make the decal

for you and then clear it. That would look pretty good. The

last option you have, is if you don't have the ability to clear coat

yourself, you can grab a piece of vinyl and basically just cover this up

with some black vinyl

you probably wouldn't really notice it too badly with the front deraillur and everything

being here, put a bottle cage on it. You probably wouldn't notice it too bad.

You want to make sure that you always cover the repair

area with something, you want to protect it from the UV rays

In our case, we have used a UV stable epoxy, but we're not quite sure what Giant's used in

the past. They could've used something that wasn't UV stable

They probably have, and it's probably just fine ...but

you wanna make sure, so we will usually recommend to do a

UV stable clear coat, which any automotive clear coat is,

or by using a piece of vinyl, if you use vinyl make sure it's

always covered. Now we've gone ahead and gone over all the finishing options, one of the things to clarify

between doing an

at-home repair and having a professional, like Predator Cycling

repair it for you, is we're gonna use a couple different procedures

At our shop here, we use vacuums to do all of our repairs

And that allows us to get even better than the compression tape

on the adhesion to the repair and to make sure we get all of the epoxy out

You really get just a little better finish on there

and you get a little bit smoother finish. We're also using a couple different tools here that we don't

talk about. This kit and these videos are gears towards

at-home repair and we're trying to use the tools and procedures

that you can do at home with everything that you have in your garage

The other thing to mention here is that

at Predator, we only offer two finishing options. We do a standard clear coat

which would basically be, at this point we clean the graphics up and clear coat

the other option that we offer is a matched finish

and the match finish, we'd either do a vinyl decal and clear

or have it painted and cleared. We don't offer a vinyl coat

covering. The reason we do that is, we're not sure that

a customer will not take that vinyl protective

sheet off, we want to make sure that it's fully protected and it's

UV stable. We use the top-of-the-line automotive clear coats

here to be completely UV stable and we also use

top-of-the-line vinyls here so you get really nice, thin crisp edges

As you can see our DIY kit includes all the needed supplies and materials

to do an at-home carbon repair . With the proper materials and instructions you can be on your

next ride even faster than before

For anything that's a larger more complicated repair

please don't hesitate to reach out Predator Cycling, one of our technicians will be

happy to assist you with a quote. Please visit us at our site

to see our latest custom carbon builds, as well as our custom carbon components and our shop apparel

also check out our custom carbon accessories

such as the Razorback 2.0, which is our carbon fiber

race number holder, for road racers and triathletes alike

Thanks for watching and we'll catch you next time. If you like the video

you can go ahead and click on subscribe button here and you can get all of our

latest videos

if you missed any part of the DIY carbon repair video series you can catch both

part 1 and part 2 here

guys thanks again for watching

Graphic