Hi,

I have no experience with Carbon fibre and do not understand anything about it so need someone to rest my mind.

I have just bought a second hand bike and the carbon fibre frame looks distorted at parts (I’ve attached two videos).

Does this mean the carbon fibre isn’t genuine or is this just a poorly made frame?

Could it cause any problems in the long term?

Cheers,
Lewis

Can't see anything attached

You do see distortion/defects in pre pre carbon (straight off the roll) sometimes but this is usually not used especially if it is the first cosmetic layer of a part.

It can also be distortion from the laminator when placing the carbon, they should be better at it than that.

Unlikely it is a big risk since the bikes are made from a number of layers and this surface is just one layer of many.

Having said that I have seen a number of broken frames that I have repaired where there are distortions further in the laminate where usually their internal bladder process and caught or pulled the fibres/layers into a crease like shape and this is the cause of the break, the breaks are usually right on the distorted crease.

Bikes are not checked and made with the kind of fail safe methods etc that you would find in aircraft manufacture so these kind of failures are always a possibility. 

To be fair it looks more like a messy joint rather than a pinch or crease in the material. In which case, it is more of a cosmetic concern. Would theoretically be slightly weaker due to misalignment, but as Fasta pointed out it is likely to just be in the outer layer.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, to me what you can see there doesn't look like any concern structurally speaking. The bigger concern is probably more a case of 'if this is what their cosmetic outer layer looks like, what did they do internally'. But, it's probably fine.