On Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 2:38:52 AM UTC+1, Emanuel Berg wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:

Steel. I typically ride with North Road bars
and have never even heard of such bars being
made of aluminium. It seems likely to me that
what Wim had was a specialty item.

Is there a blacksmith trick to determine this
on an actual handlebar?

Here is a web page [1] that attempts to answer
this question, and from skimming it I imagine
this is the best answer:

Take one piece of aluminium and one piece
of stainless steel and hold it in ur hand -
they must be the same size, you can feel
the weight different: aluminium is much
lighter, while stainless is much heavier.
Or a simple test, take a needle file, just
file on the aluminium and you see that
aluminium material can be removed easily by
filing away with a needle file while
stainless is much harder and you can't file
and remove any material on that piece of
stainless steel, in short stainless is the
heavier and harder material and aluminium
is the lighter and easily
deformed material.

[1] http://www.engineering.com/Ask/tabid...0/Default.aspx

--
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Use a magnet.

Lou