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Frame Materials

22K views 272 replies 28 participants last post by  Lombard 
#1 ·
Most of the newest top end bikes are carbon fiber and the latest trends are for lighter and ever lighter bikes. This causes manufacturers to make lighter and lighter frames.

While carbon fiber has higher strength to weight ratio than most other materials it also has its own problems - the thread length of a carbon fiber is short. This means that as the frame resin embrittles with age the frames can fail catastrophically.

Exactly how much of a problem this seems to be is a question since Trek offers a lifetime limited warranty (they replace the frame only). I think that Specialized matches this but I haven't actually found it written anywhere. But Colnago who has more experience with the material than most other companies only offers a 3 year warranty and that only because it is the minimum by law in many states. They state, when asked, that they don't trust them beyond two years, Now I'm not sure I understand this since most of the Colnagos are constructed quite conservatively and not for minimum weights. Virtually all of the top end CF bikes are lighter than Colnago. And the Taiwanese versions (CLX etc.) pioneered the stress management techniques used in Aerospace industries. Is this only self protection? I don't know.

Titanium frames have roughly the same weight as CF plus they are extremely resilient as long as they are welded properly. It is always possible though rare, for the helium envelope that the welding is accomplished under to allow some oxygen in and cause titanium oxide to form in or around a weld. This is a brittle material and generally if you don't find a crack within a month you're safe forever. This is a long lived material.

Aluminum frames also CAN last forever but they began pressing the envelope of weight pretty rapidly so some frame cracks started appearing relatively early. And unlike titanium they can occur at any time over the life of the material. However, it must be noted that these failures are seldom catastrophic. Usually they will begin making odd noises and you will look and discover a broken tube while the others are fine.

Steel bike frame are another matter. By the time they started making very high quality steel tubing at Columbus, Reynolds and others, it was long after WW II and steel had become a science. There was no guesswork in the double and triple butted tubes and only the very occasional manufacturing errors caused these frames to break. What's more, although they give away a small weight penalty, the frame and fork are only a part of the weight of a bicycle so this penalty is relatively small.

At the moment that UCI has a weight restriction on bicycles of approximately 15 lbs and this isn't very far from the very top end steel bikes though even one ounce is now considered extreme on race tracks and in truth only those with a lot of climbing.

So what we're presently seeing in cycling is probably a very bad trend - lightest weight possible which is similar to the latest trend in components which are the largest number of speeds possible. This will cause little more than headaches for the sports/recreational rider. Though some trends are good (tubeless tires) most of the others are not, More speeds means narrower cogs and rings, higher ratio differences with 11-32 cogsets for hard Tour stages and derailleurs now so weak that picking up a rock or wire into your rear derailleur can end your ride. It makes you yearn for the old days of 8 speeds when you could have a gear for every purpose without having to shift two or three times every time you are changing terrain. So maybe manufacturers should be building bikes more for the actual use of a rider rather than getting them to play at racing rather than buying a bike that actually serves a purpose. This is fine for kids but I have ridden in a lot of areas and what I'm seeing is that riders tend to be in the mid 30's and later. Racers are very few but people trying to keep up with them are far too plentiful. And here I am now in the higher age group and most of my riding buddies are dead or having extreme health problems.

I have a good day when I do a metric and average 15 mph. And yet when I did a very large metric with about 2,000 riders in it when I crossed the line I was told that I was the 182nd finisher. And several hundred of the Century riders started an hour before me! Does this sound like people should be worried about maximum performance and only using the lightest and most expensive bikes made? You could get a high quality high quantity manufactured bike made of steel with top line components on it for $2,500 or less vs a $13,000 carbon fiber wonder. If you are in your mid to late 30's that $10,000 in your retirement account can made a huge difference to having a longer and more comfortable retirement on your original bike!
 
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#12 ·
Yup. He starts right out with a falsehood: "Titanium frames have roughly the same weight as CF." Simply not true. Note that I am on my second Ti frame, and if it got wrecked I would buy another, but I know full well that you can't make a comparable Ti frame to a CF frame at the same weight.

Beyond that the OP puts a lot of words together but I'm not sure what is the point of it all. Ignoring the technical misperceptions, the argument for anything in particular is not clear.
 
#8 ·
I tend to agree with cxwrench. I'm not sure what the OP's point was.
I think it was...enjoy riding and not buying.
Prices got ridiculous high last few years and they are basically selling us nothing that we need.


Sent from my SM-G960F using Tapatalk
 
#9 ·
These "they're selling bikes we don't need" threads are hilarious. Nothing new about them, complainers been going on for years.
All you NEED are two wheels and pedals. Hell, they use to do the tour DE France on single speeds. So you don't need all those fancy gears lol.
There's bikes at all price levels. You can buy a decent bike for $1000, better than a bike from 10 years ago.

Buy what you want. Ride it and have fun.
 
#11 ·
Well, I don't think that you can buy a "decent" bike for $1,000 but then I have had absolutely top end second hand bikes of every material and have probably a different idea of what "decent" is. Aside from my Colnago CLX 3.0, I presently have a Lemond Zurich made of Reynolds 853 which is the finest riding bike I've ever ridden. Ready to ride in a Metric the Colnago weighs 19.8 lbs and the Lemond 22.2 lbs. These are both "Extra Large" models,

Now, since I've built these up myself they are cheaper than if you had it built up by a shop but I still have about $1,500 in either. The Basso Loto which is presently being reconditioned will be in the same price range. But these are absolutely top of the line in my opinion and I've been riding the best money can buy until the last 5 years. And if the newest bikes are in any way better it sure as hell doesn't make any difference to a 75 year old.

I'm presently close to 4,500 miles for the year. I missed the first three months because of first my eye surgery and then having to take by brother back and forth to the eye doctor every couple of days for his eyes. Then we had almost a solid month of rain. So I'm well behind my norm. And since around here we do a lot of climbing I'm just about to break 200,000 ft of climbing for the year. And I only count climbing that is 5% or more in the majority.

So it isn't as if I haven't had a great deal of experience or miles. Before I had a head injury in 2009 I had done 3 years over 10,000 miles and almost a half million feet of climbing in a row. 2009 was just under that.

I used to mostly ride Colnagos and Masi's. But the Colnagos were all materials from steel to titanium to aluminum to carbon fiber. I also had several English steel bikes and the Mersian was really a dream bike. In the Early days it was French bikes with Peugeot P-series the most common.

People that put in 1,000 miles a year on the flats seem the most likely to criticize other people talking about anything and these forums attract them like flies.

I have worked in metals and heliarc'd titanium. That they use argon these days doesn't mean some one that knows that is some sort of expert. Helium is lighter than air and tends to needs to have a higher flow rate to maintain the envelope. Argon as anyone in first year chemistry would know is heavier than air slightly and would tend to hold the envelope far more cheaply. Should we be impressed that they use argon these days and someone knows that?

This being a discussion forum should be used for discussions and not for those who want to think they are exerting some sort of superiority over others. They certainly aren't and it only interrupts the discussions.
 
#10 ·
Though some trends are good (tubeless tires)......................
Seriously, you must be joking. Sorry, but I am not convinced that the advantages of tubeless outweigh the headaches.

You could get a high quality high quantity manufactured bike made of steel with top line components on it for $2,500 or less vs a $13,000 carbon fiber wonder. If you are in your mid to late 30's that $10,000 in your retirement account can made a huge difference to having a longer and more comfortable retirement on your original bike!
I'm not really sure what your point is here. While I am not arguing that spending more than $3,000 on a bike gets you nothing more than fluff, the difference between the $2,500 bike vs. the $13,000 bike isn't the frame material. Contrary to what you believe, the cost difference between a carbon fiber frame and a CroMo frame isn't that different. The componentry on the bike makes for the biggest price difference.
 
#17 ·
Seriously, you must be joking. Sorry, but I am not convinced that the advantages of tubeless outweigh the headaches.

I'm not really sure what your point is here. While I am not arguing that spending more than $3,000 on a bike gets you nothing more than fluff, the difference between the $2,500 bike vs. the $13,000 bike isn't the frame material. Contrary to what you believe, the cost difference between a carbon fiber frame and a CroMo frame isn't that different. The componentry on the bike makes for the biggest price difference.
I don't know what "headaches" you've had using tubeless tires but I haven't had headaches at all after the initial learning period. When you first install them they are slightly messy until you learn how to deal with them and then they are no problem if you use the proper sealants. Orange has to be replaced every 3 months and Finish Line is more or less permanent and you MIGHT have to add some additional after about the first three months and then you're OK. Like tube or tubular you have to maintain the pressure though it is lower and the rolling resistance of the tires are so much lower that even pro teams are moving over to them for their TT bikes. While I wasn't having flats using Continental Gatorskins the road feel was terrible and I was always afraid of losing traction. Using the Vittoria tubeless tires or the Continental GP5000TL's is GREAT.

A pro mechanic told me that the only reason that they use tubulars is because they can change a flat inside the team car on the move since they have limited roof rack room and you can watch the coverage of the Grand Tours and see them leaning out the windows and replacing the re-tired and refilled tire in the available wheel rack. This is especially important now with different disk brake and axle diameter standards from team to team.

As recreational riders we were using clinchers rather than the far better tubular tires because of convenience. Tubeless gives you tubular performance with even better convenience than clinchers because you never get a flat. Well, you can but it would take almost the destruction of the tire and that would stop you with any type of tire.

A friend of mine had his C40 collapse on him and now has a carbon fiber phobia so he wants only metal everything on his bikes. He would allow carbon shifters but Campy no longer makes a Record triple and he and his wife ride the smallest gears possible which is a bit odd since he was a Cat A racer. Maybe he considers himself old and broken down at 60. In any case, going to Italy and being measured by Tomassini himself and having custom bikes made with Campy Centaur and Mavic top end wheelsets and shipped to this country through their official US dealership, assembled here and delivered to him was $3,000/bike new.

While I'll grant you that putting electronic shifting and American deep section aero wheels with hydraulic disk brakes on a bike will shoot the price through the roof not a whole lot of people are willing to pay $3,000 for a bike, let alone $13,000. And damned if I can see one single advantage of electronic shifting.

Disk brakes are a hazard as far as I'm concerned, My hydraulics put me over the bars on a hard descent when the front wheel hit a hard pothole and I did the natural thing and tightened my grip on the bars hard to avoid being thrown off. So the only advantage they seem to have is in rain where they clear the braking surface more rapidly. I do not purposely ride in the rain like a European pro is forced to do.

I buy Chinese deep section wheels and I have had ONE rim become delaminated. The company sent me a new rim which I stupidly accepted. Though I'm a fair wheel builder, carbon wheels are NOT put together like aluminum rims. They are put together on fully automated machines using torque measurements and not distance as old aluminum wheels were. So while it takes me less than an hour to build an aluminum wheel it took me three days to build the new deep section carbon rim. What a pain! It should be noted that because carbon fiber rims have a large variation in the bed thickness/strength, unlike an aluminum wheel in which the spoke tensions are nearly equal the CF wheel can have very large differences in spoke tension.

I have four sets of these wheels and that one failure on initial filling. The 50 mm deep clincher wheels are the best. They have almost no response to side gusts of wind. Maybe even less than a shallow section Campy aluminum wheel. The 55 mm deep tubulars were not safe - they did not have high enough spoke tension so I boosted it up and they are pretty good now. They do not wander around from insufficient spoke tension.

You have to be aware that Continental GP5000's have such great traction that they wander a bit because of road irregularities even where it appears to be flat. The Vittorias do not do that since they have longitudinal tread on them. And they appear to have as good traction. (Be absolutely certain you put the Continentals on in the correct direction of rotation as noted on the sidewall).

So you can spend a great deal of money on a bike but what are you gaining? The UCI race weight limit is about 15 lbs so most carbon fiber frames are built without serious regard to weight. So you can make an aluminum alloy, titanium or carbon fiber bike that all weigh nearly the same if you are that interested in weight.

Assistant professor for the department of exercise and sport science at the University of Utah James C. Martin, Ph.D, put the weight of a bicycle to the test by measuring a rider's time on a 7 percent incline over 5 kilometers using a 15-pound bike (the minimum for racing as per the UCI rules) and the same bike with 5 pounds added. The difference in the climbing averages was about six seconds. That means that you can expect a mere 6 seconds over about 2 1/2 miles of 7 percent which is fairly steep. Around this country most people cannot climb at that sort of speed on that incline for 2 1/2 miles. Around here it is just a normal incline with "real" climbing at 10% and above. Although I can't go very far, I have done 1/8 mile of 24% and could actually coach people on a 16% incline. (This is on road bikes. On a full suspension 29er I found that I could BARELY climb a 24% in the lowest of gears because of the massive increase in weight and not at all on a CX bike since the super low gears it required would lift the front wheel causing the bike to spin around. This is why CX racers run and carry.)

If on a normal incline a normal incline a 30% increase in weight makes nearly no difference in climbing speed who is fooling who about bicycle weights in the modern range? For the recreational rider, age and training makes FAR more difference than weight or number of speeds.
 
#33 ·
Trolls taste like chicken.
 
#43 ·
.......
Aluminum frames also CAN last forever ..........
Not according to my Materials professor at the engineering school where I received my engineering degree. Aluminum, by definition, ALWAYS has a finite life. You seem to know ugatz about everything you talk about in your screed. I am now that much dumber for wasting my time reading your drivel. Don't you have better things to do than post long-winded tomes on stuff which you are profoundly ignorant about?
 
#61 ·
Indeed your professor is correct. BUT if that finite life is longer than your own lifespan what difference does it make? Alan and Vitus aluminum bikes are all over the place and not failing. You can go to Trek and buy lower end aluminum framed road bikes with a lifetime warranty on them.

Aluminum is a material that always has a stress to failure point. But it is entirely dependent upon the percentage of stress to material strength. Heavier tubes (relatively) last longer. Some aluminum alloys have such a high strength that the stress of a rider on a frame is so small that you can effectively say that they are not being stressed.

What do you suppose the lifespan of a B52 is? They are made entirely of aluminum alloy and were initially brought into service in 1954. Although most of the fleet is moth-balled virtually every one of them is flyable.
 
#48 ·
#83 ·
ASFOS' troll threads were more fun.
 
#91 ·
From the article you linked to support your claim that you can just stick a pre-glued (and dried) tubluar on a rim and ride it in a race:

"You can — carefully — ride home on a spare tubular stretched over a rim, but you must glue this new tubular in place before your next ride. Gluing a tubular is no piece of cake either and a bad job can result in the tyre rolling off the rim and a painful crash."

Go home Dad, you're drunk
 
#92 ·
From the article you linked to support your claim that you can just stick a pre-glued (and dried) tubluar on a rim and ride it in a race:

"You can — carefully — ride home on a spare tubular stretched over a rim
Meh.... what pro racer doesn't like to carefully ride to the finish line after their mechanic puts a pre-glued tire on in the back of a moving car. Happens all the time. Sometimes the entire peloton rides carefully after they all simultaneously flat at once.


Hilarious when someone clueless provides their own evidence to further prove their cluelessness.
 
#97 ·
Two things Tom.

Please provide a link to the time the entire Tour peloton got flat tires at the same time. I googled that and came up short. I've watched every tour since 1986 and don't recall having seen this.

Who is the pro mechanic who told you the tubular tire bologna and what team did he work for?
 
#115 ·
I see an orange chicklet in Tom Kunich's near future.
 
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