"Tom" wrote in message
ups.com...
You can't compare airplanes to bike frames, there is just no way.

I agree! Yet the airplane analogy is brought up constantly, because it just
seems so obvious that if engineers make airplane hulls out of aluminum that
surely aluminum is good for bicycles!

Aluminum or airplanes is constantly pressurized and de-pressurized,
it's not even comparable. Aluminum does have a finite life, as does
most materials. Chromoly frames are great, as long as you like heavy
bike frames, and don't go spouting off about how light the new steel
is, because at the wall thicknesses that you have to use to make a
steel frame as light as an aluminum frame, I'm thinking one crash,
and you'd be done because it would dent and or fold on you.

It is more expensive to make a light bicycle with a chromoly frame. You can
still buy them, but you'll pay a lot more. The advantage of steel is that
when it does fail, it does so preditictably, not catastrophically.

I've had many bikes over the years, amazingly enough, the only frame
I've ever broken was a custom steel frame. Steel is not real, step
into the 21st century my friend.

Again, anecdotal evidence does not prove anything. You'd be hard pressed to
get statistics out of companies like Specialized or Trek, on numbers of
frame failures. But ask a long-time bike shop owner about comparative
numbers of frame failures, normalized for the number of bikes of each
material that they sell. Overwhelmingly, you'll find that frame failures
were very rare in the days of chromolloy steel frames, and became a big
problem with the early aluminum frames, and remain a problem though less
severe, with the current aluminum frames.

I've updated the section on aluminum versus steel on
http://bicycleshortlist.com .

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