Carbon is a wonderful frame material, and now that I'm hooked on it, I doubt I'll ever go back to the metals. I did my research on it before buying my new bike 15,000 miles ago, and found that it does not fatigue like the metals, it's stronger in most ways, it does not degrade in UV and weather, and does not add its own resonances like the metals do (which is what makes it feel so smooth). It's even fairly inexpensive to repair (although none of the materials are really repairable on the road). See
http://www.calfeedesign.com/howtosendrepair.htm .)
However, I've never seen a carbon-fiber bike with the eyelets to attach racks. So far for me that's ok because I only want to do credit-card touring carrying only what will fit in the biggest seat bags. I have a trip coming up in a couple of weeks with just the Jandd Mountain Wedge III bag with 450 cubic inches. The biggest seat bags have over three times that much room, or nearly a cubic foot, kind of like having a small duffel bag back there. You can also use a seatpost rack and a handlebar bag if your load is bigger but not full-sized for camping. For bikes with no eyelets, some rack manufacturers like Tubus make a gizmo that gets clamped in the skewer, outside the dropouts, to effectively give you eyelets, like this:
The picture on the Marin website shows eyelets behind the fork's dropouts, but none at the rear dropouts.
I just realized we kind of hijacked the thread, but I hope this is helpful to the original poster anyway. rubyann, hopefully you've spent some time on the Adventure Cycling website and others like crazyguyonabike.com . You'll probably need to ask some specific questions, even if you think yours are kind of dumb. The answers should be helpful. How are your plans and preparations coming?
This message was edited by whittierider on 7-24-08 @ 9:35 PM
