My concern with carbon fibre is that you don't know it's failing until it fails. That is, with metal, (if you look hard enough with the right tools) you can often see a nascent crack growing. On the other hand, in my experience, limited to boats, oars and composite bits in sailing rigging) a CF component will show no problems until it just completely pops.
There's also the issue of distortion - metal is malleable to an extent (like a dent in a car) but will still maintain some degree of integrity, whereas CF tends to just crumble if distorted very much (unless you stick in multiple layers - adding weight).
Can anyone tell me if diagnostic technology has advanced so as to be able to detect problems at an early stage? My belief has long been that, gram for gram, CF is stronger than most metals, as long as the loads are pretty straightforward; put the load on the CF the wrong way, and a catastrophic failure follows pretty quickly.
And, will they age well, or fall apart as soon as the first lease is up?! This is a serious question as one of the things taken into account in a purchase decision is residual value.
This is NOT an A-v-B wind-up - both are going increasingly down the composites road.
Last edited by Taildragger67; 19th Jun 2006 at 17:17.