Ageing glue

As you per­fectly know, our C59 Italia frame is build by bond­ing com­pos­ite tubes and lugs together with a spe­cial glue. Talking with fans, they often ask me what kind of glue is used, there’s often con­fu­sion with the adhe­sive resin and a major con­cern is the bond strength.

Thanks to our inter­nal lab­o­ra­tory we could improve our glue in order to obtain the per­fect inter­face between the tubes and lugs. We recently car­ried out tests on the glue and treat­ment of pre-bonding fiber. We tested both the sit­u­a­tions at the end of the process and after a (sim­u­lated) life­time of 25yrs.

As you can see from the photo gallery, the spec­i­mens were sub­jected to ten­sile force and we recorded the max­i­mum strength allowed. Other spec­i­mens, with the same spec­i­fi­ca­tions, have been treated in spe­cial tanks to sim­u­late aging and force the mois­ture absorp­tion. Then thanks to another ten­sile strenght-test we were able to check the tight­ness of our bond­ing time.

Trust us, the bond­ing is strong enough!