The points the article makes about torsional and lateral tension helped me understand better why I prefer steel over carbon. I've always described it as "feeling more in-sync" with the bike. For example, the subtle instinctive biomechanical action of putting more weight down on the outside pedal to re-align the wheels when you start to understeer just feels great, like you're "one" with the bicycle.
Would it just cost too much?
I can get a brand new lugged steel frame that would be perfect for my use -- a Surly Cross-Check. Seriously the only deterrent is a minor injury has forced me to re-think what my future needs are for geometry. I may need to adopt a more "comfort" posture. Better than not riding. Sucks to get old.
Despite my above comment, and thinking about it more, I want my next bike to be modern in the sense of accommodating fenders and much wider tires. I need horizontal dropouts and to be able to set the rear dropout spacing, to accommodate an internal gear hub (IGH).
Your comment is almost a decade out-of-date. Everyone these days has mostly converged on the same threaded BB standard for all but the highest-end bikes. Those press-fit BBs caused too many problems.
Meanwhile I damaged a thru-axle of a high-end big-name brand bike (rhymes with "wreck") I bought 2 years ago, and they told me that they no longer stock that part because it's "obsolete" (!)
A Cross Check with a flat or alt bar and 30 mm of spacers underneath? That or the Soma Doublecross without all the spacers. The main triangle and the fork are build from heat treated Tange Prestige tubes like some of the ATB frames of the '80s and '90s, unlike the Surlys which are built from utilitarian 4130 chromoly. Or the new Disc Trucker with extended head tube and the new Truck Stop riser drop bars. They shortened the chainstays and it no longer rides like barge unloaded, like the previous model.
https://somafab.blogspot.com/2020/10/soma-double-cross-signi...
https://bluelug.com/bike-catalog https://www.lafraisecycles.com/bikes
i saved up and bought a titanium litespeed and it's fantastic (for me anyway). i think Lynskey is also great (they're the family that started litespeed, which they spun off to an american investor group, so basically bifurcated with two tennessee-made names for the same group of engineers.
"they are welded, not brazed. [...] There are necked-down parts that fit into the top tube and down tube, like internal lugs."
Anecdotally, and I know the cab material is not the only difference, my RAM 1500 is leaps and bounds more comfortable and pleasant to be in than my F-150. The RAM has a steel body, whereas the F-150 is very light/rigid aluminum. The steel cab does much better with absorbing the energy/sound from the road.
Also, speed matters. Going 15 or 50 when the thing breaks makes a difference.
Isnt this an argument that helmets are more important for passenger vehicles? After all, car accidents cause about 10x more head trauma in the usa.
But, if absolute safety is paramount, you do want a five point harness, flameresistant coveralls, neck support, and a helmet, sure.
In fact the odds aren't bigger than when running. Do you think runners should wear helmets?
I chose to wear or not my helmet depending on the conditions. Running errands nearby on my girlfriend's lady bike? I don't use it. Riding on mostly separated bicycle paths at my girlfriend's slow pace, same. Riding 3h on the roads or trails on my road and mountain bikes, I wear it.
After all, are you strapping on a helmet while you're out walking, or driving a car? Sometimes, very rarely, that could be what saves your life.
Says who?
Just a couple of days ago I had a runner get past me while I was walking on the street, 2 seconds later she hit a bump on the pavement with her foot and fell down hard (she even made a loud splash sound as she hit the ground). No, she didn't have a helmet. Should she have?
At the end of the day, people should be walking around in full steel plate armour, for protection and safety. Or even better, not walking around at all. Bicycles should be banned!
> it's easy to hit a crack in the pavement and lose control on a bike.
No, its not. The person who says this probably hadn't ridden a bicycle in their life, or if they have, not often and not recently.
Bicycle wheels are EXCELLENT at getting over cracks, bumps, ditches, holes, whatever - as long as the attack angle is as close to 90 degrees as possible. It is the riders responsibility to make sure that is the case. Wider tires also help, lower pressures too... and high speeds, counterintuitively.
Of course, if you are afraid of falling or uncertain of your skills on the bike, wear a helmet by all means. Just don't think that it is "normal" and all riders are like that.
Did she hit her head? Humans are hardwired by millions of years of evolution to protect themselves in falls using their arms and hands; they generally handle falls very well. Humans have not evolved to handle riding bikes, and using your hands to protect your head in falls isn't instinctive there like it is while running or walking.
>No, its not. The person who says this probably hadn't ridden a bicycle in their life, or if they have, not often and not recently.
This is just stupid and argumentative. Road surfaces are frequently bad and people make mistakes.
>Of course, if you are afraid of falling or uncertain of your skills on the bike, wear a helmet by all means.
Yes, because I'm sure you're such a perfect rider who never makes a mistake.
Helmets are designed to limit head injuries when you bang your head on the ground mostly. If you get mauled by a truck or a suv it is unlikely to help much although it will still help if you bang and rebound on it.
you are much more likely to fall from a bicycle than while walking or getting in or out of a car. For people who are at risk from falling while walking, yes, precautions are taken that they not fall or hit their heads (or hips), it's quite dangerous.
I'm not advocating helmet use. But nor do I advocate for me to pay for patching you up if you don't.
That's the exact same argument the anti-helmet crowd is making of cycling.
In order for your argument to work, you have to either provide a quantitative basis for why your tradeoff totally is worth it and the other is not, or you have to come up with a qualitatively different argument.
> the additional protection of a helmet is not worth the additional inconvenience
I actually pointed out that protection of a helmet for pedestrians is called for as standard practice (by others, not by me)
As a road cyclist I go 30-50 km/h with a helmet. And as a commuter I’ll keep a moderate 20 km/h without a helmet. Big difference in terms of kinetic energy.
Biking at less than 25km/h just isn't that dangerous (unless a car hits you)
That’s like first generation carbon failure and those went away 20 years ago. I’d blame the manufacturer specifically in that case because it’s both catastrophic & unexpected.
Anyway it’s weird because it doesn’t look broken on a weld, very rare situation, titanium should last forever.
Yikes! Fork failure is the stuff of nightmares. I'm glad you're okay.
Among the participants of a local riding club in my area, I've met two people with custom titanium frame builds who told me that their frames cracked within a few years of use.
Still have nightmares about a fork that, during a mountain bike descent 30 years ago, started oscillating increasingly until it bent and locked the wheel perpendicular to my vector - and my buddy still has dreams of me acting Superman along his ride, for a few short instants...
I've always thought a spring bronze/brass frame would be fun. Even better modulus of elasticity, but the strength to weight is much worse.
Also keep waiting to see flash bainite frames.
One guy was going over railroad tracks and his handlebars just came off. Not what you want in the middle of a cat-1/pro peloton.
It was a break that I would have noticed much sooner, had I regularly inspected it, because the other side was half broken off.
The funny thing is, I play in a band, and when I told my story that night, 3 guys in the band offered to weld it.
There are great bikes of very different materials.
I owned great bikes in steel, alu and carbon. My most comfortable and efficient road bike was made of carbon, the less comfortable made of crude 4130 steel tubing while some other steel bikes were really nice to ride but not as comfy as my current carbon bike. Reason is mostly because these bikes had that old school italian geometry with very short chainstays and couldn't accept tires bigger than 23mm.
I've seen steel bikes bent into unrepairability while I've seen carbon bikes shattered into several pieces then repaired and rebuild with very little difference in ride feeling after the repair for a tiny fraction of the cost a custom builder would ask to replace steel tubes on an existing high end steel frame.
I'm sorry, but this is BS. I don't think you can fix double/triple butted tubes easily, and even if you could, I wouldn't trust them any longer.
I once owned a steel-framed Italian road bike, made around 1985-1990. I bought it cheap because neither I nor the seller knew at the time that it was a real pedigree race bike, which meant lightweight tubes and probably quality steel (I don't know what it was made of, but the whole bike weighed in under 10kg with pedals, which for an older steel framed bike is excellent).
Then I crashed it, I went straight into a lamp post at around 20kmh. It was not a nice experience on myself, but the bike... the fork was bent backwards so that the front wheel went past the down tube. The top tube was bent, dented and bashed and cracked, almost unrecognizably. It was clear from the first moment that no-one will be riding that frame again...
...until a guy turned up to "buy" the frame & parts (I gave them away for free). Guess what, he just needed the lugs and he built a bamboo bike from them! That's how you recycle for good.
I'm still trying to understand the talk about over/understeer and how the bottom bracket is involved. Are you saying you put down more weight on the outside pedal on each rotation of the crank as you're going through a turn?
Also, isn't there some wasted energy going into flexing the frame that should go into the road?
Surely that depends on the hands.
• steel, straight-gauge Hi-Ten from the mid 90's
• steel, double-butted, Columbus SL from the late 70's/ early 80's
• steel, double-butted, Tange 1 from the late 80's
• steel, not sure but it was a Kona Rova from 2020 I believe
• aluminum, Cannondale R300 from the mid 90's
• aluminum, Specialized SmartWeld DSW from 2016
• aluminum, Cannondale Synapse from the late 2010's
I personally love Columbus SL. I believe it was 0.1 mm thicker all around than even the Tange 1 bike in numbers (but I'm not sure if both triangles were double-butted or only the main one). But it feels springier, even with the same wheels & tires & components swapped between the two frames.
I didn't mind the Cannondale Synapse. It subjectively felt better than the Smartweld aluminum, but the difference could have been in the wider tires on the Synapse (versus the Spesh).
The Kona Rove... for some reason was a bit of a letdown. People seem to love that bike, though.
And Hi-Ten is as stiff and clunky as everyone says. Pure beater material right there.
But the Cannondale R300's mid 90's aluminum was even harsher and wrist-numbing. It'll rattle you to your core!
All of this is anecdotal & subjective, though. I've learned to compensate the added road-noise from the Specialized aluminum by hovering off my saddle and bending my elbows a bit while loosening my grip.
But man, I love that racing steel bike. It makes me wanna try Tange Prestige of the road variety, and Ti as well.
Only other thing I'm super curious about is CAAD 12 Aluminum, but on forums I've read that CAAD 12's are slightly harsher than SuperSix Evo's (all carbon).
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Edited to include some other bikes & models
- Steel Pogliaghi Track bike. 80's vintage, handbuilt. Thinwall standard diameter tubing. Probably the flexiest bike I've ridden, super easy to see BB and fork flex.
- Handbuilt steel road, mid-90s, Columbus OS tubing I think. Kenesis bonded AL fork. Pretty harsh. The carbon forks of the time were much smoother. When I get it from storage (where it's been for a decade), I'm going to put a custom steel fork on it and ride it on sunny days and smooth pavement.
- Handbuilt steel 26" road tandem. Late 90's. hand built steel unicrown fork. I _love_ this bike. It's running wide Rene Herse tires now. It is so planted on descents with bad pavement. My next single is going to try to replicate the feel of this bike in a single. (probably something like a Crust Lightning Bolt, if I can get one in the EU)
- An Al Redline Cross bike (kinesis unicrown alu fork, which was an out and out noodle), and later with a Surly crosscheck fork (harsh, heavy). Very comfy till I killed the fork. Sadly, there's a fatigue crack at the bottom bracket.
- An over stiff Al gravel bike (PlanetX Full Monty) w/ carbon fork, mildly redeemed by 650cx48 RH tires. It's so stiff that standing really isn't encouraged, the bike just feels dead.
- Inexpensive Carbon road bike (PlanetX pro carbon) with carbon fork. Nice enough for the 6k miles I used it, but I'm done with 25c tires and no space for fenders. It's no faster than the gravel bike, despite being 4 kilos lighter.
- Mid 90's Cannondale 3.0 frame. Stiff. I greatly preferred the Steel one that replaced it.
My experience would say -- The forks really matter. The lighter unicrown forks are so much better than the super stiff ones. Wide, supple tires matter too. They're a good 7+% faster on the tandem, and probably the only reason I like riding the AL Gravel bike.
All your testing & experimenting & getting to sample the goods sounds absolutely fun though.
Oh how we fool ourselves! Just one more I promise, wallet!
My core still loves a polished weld! Made in the USA!
> - The true quality of a frame is felt in the descents - In a racing bicycle, half a degree in the construction of the frame is more important than half a kilo in its weight - 20 grams on the wheels are more important than 500 grams on the frame - The tubes of a frame are like the ingredients of a dish. All are important but the taste depends on the skill of the chef - A racing bicycle must be made to measure - The bicycle is the heritage of Italian Culture, and we must preserve it - A steel frame is like a gold coin. It keeps it's value as the years pass by - The frame is the heart of the bicycle, and the groupset merely the clothes it puts on
This is a quality modern steel tube set:
https://ciclicorsa.com/shop/columbus-spirit-tube-set/
A frame will retail to at least 4x times as much.
I have an Allez Sprint from a few years ago - it's aluminum alloy with carbon forks+seat, but the joints are welded a few inches away from the joints instead of right at the joint. The result is a stronger bike and an extremely responsive ride that I enjoy for rides <50m miles. You'll feel everything in the pavement, which is both a good and bad thing depending on your preferences.
For longer rides it's hard to beat my old-school fully lugged steel frame on flat routes, but the added weight usually isn't worth the tradeoff for me.
older aluminum frames have a reputation for feeling harsh, but it's not because they're made out of aluminum
They were super harsh because they were aiming for stiffness, and the material allowed them to do that.
I rode a boring old aluminum 6061 GT for a couple of years back in ~2010, and I now own a Cannondale CAAD12 aluminum alloy frame. I ended up putting it full-time on trainer duty. I thought it was stiff, and the overall "feeling" was crisp. If I were feeling uncharitable I might say it's harder to control. I hear the CAAD13 frames improve on ride quality.
I've found it very difficult to find a non-steel bike that offers the same ride characteristics that I've become accustomed to. And honestly at this point I don't have a lot of time and incentive to keep trying different things when I feel I've found something that just works really well for me.
If you remove the force so fast that the frame doesn't have the time to return the energy back to you, then it will disperse the energy by ringing. But i don't think it's realistic unless you drive your pedals with hammer strikes.
For example, in a touring bike, you might prefer steels robustness and softer feel for long hauls. Some people might prefer carbon for it's lightness. It's all down to choice, neither is objectively better.
A racing bike should flex vertically but not horizontally.