editorial opinion, steel frames

writes:

Not only that but every bike tested is "this is the
best bike I've ever ridden."

Here they say "If you are an X or a Y or have a desire
to do Z then this is a bike for you".

They *never* say a bike is bad. And why would they be
at such prices?

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

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 12:31:17 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 2:01:27 PM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:

AMuzi wrote:

According to the cycling press over the past
30~40 years, steel frames are flexible, yet
rigid. Carbon frames are rigid, yet flexible.


A quick perusal of aluminum frame test rides will show that
aluminum is no good because it's 'noodly' and also because
it's 'too harsh', except for advertised models which are
both rigid and flexible.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

I was just about to ask about aluminum frames. They seem to be the forgotten step child now days. I remember back in the 1980s when Cannondale came out with their big tubes, and Klein too, aluminum was the greatest material on earth. Glad to hear aluminum frames are both rigid and flexible just like all the other extra superior frame materials. You did not mention titanium. But I'll assume its also rigid and flexible and superior to everything too.

Personally, I own steel, titanium, aluminum, and carbon frames. They all ride fine. I cannot tell which one I am on unless I look. But I am very insensitive. Probably from years of riding Brooks and Ideale saddles. My arse is as tough as my Brooks Team Pro saddles with the hand hammered copper rivets.

I sure as hell can tell you what bike I'm on with my eyes closed. Steel bikes have an initial flex and then harden up rapidly. This is nice on the pot-holed streets of California. All and I mean ALL of the other materials are so ridged that they can knock your eyeballs out. I can only assume that where ever you live the roads are in pretty good condition.

Remember a couple of months ago when I told everyone that I was riding on a particular section of flat road and was coasting and when I rode onto a new section of road the bike accelerated 2 mph? Everyone said it wasn't possible. I don't think I said anything at the time but anyone in engineering would not only know it was possible but that it would be expected.

Likewise - because aluminum is soft they use aircraft aluminum that is alloyed with other things and heat treated for exceptional hardness or they use softer aluminum and large diameter tubes that give very high stiffness ratios.

Carbon fiber is stiff as a natural property of a resin/cloth layup. If it flexes you're in trouble. Resin doesn't like to flex. Though you could use a flexy resin all the way down to rubber-like. But let's see you get an ultra-light layup that way.

Titanium bikes use oversize tubing but titanium is sensitive to heat damage.. On of the group I ride with came riding up on a new Linskey or something and I warned him to look at the joints before each ride. He really laid into me about his great new bike. Yes they are great but on the very next ride I pointed out a crack parallel to the top tube. He warranted it for a new frame and this one has been bullet proof. But between you and I, he probably checks for cracks often.

It took me a long time to get used to riding bikes as stiff as most modern rides and then when I went back to steel it was old home week.

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 1:24:22 PM UTC-7, Emanuel Berg wrote:
writes:

Not only that but every bike tested is "this is the
best bike I've ever ridden."

Here they say "If you are an X or a Y or have a desire
to do Z then this is a bike for you".

They *never* say a bike is bad. And why would they be
at such prices?

Rather than the prices I would assume that it is more a case of experience with the materials and the extremely long term development of the technology such as full suspension.

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 1:24:56 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 12:31:17 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 2:01:27 PM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:

AMuzi wrote:

According to the cycling press over the past
30~40 years, steel frames are flexible, yet
rigid. Carbon frames are rigid, yet flexible.


A quick perusal of aluminum frame test rides will show that
aluminum is no good because it's 'noodly' and also because
it's 'too harsh', except for advertised models which are
both rigid and flexible.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

I was just about to ask about aluminum frames. They seem to be the forgotten step child now days. I remember back in the 1980s when Cannondale came out with their big tubes, and Klein too, aluminum was the greatest material on earth. Glad to hear aluminum frames are both rigid and flexible just like all the other extra superior frame materials. You did not mention titanium. But I'll assume its also rigid and flexible and superior to everything too.

Personally, I own steel, titanium, aluminum, and carbon frames. They all ride fine. I cannot tell which one I am on unless I look. But I am very insensitive. Probably from years of riding Brooks and Ideale saddles. My arse is as tough as my Brooks Team Pro saddles with the hand hammered copper rivets.

I sure as hell can tell you what bike I'm on with my eyes closed. Steel bikes have an initial flex and then harden up rapidly. This is nice on the pot-holed streets of California. All and I mean ALL of the other materials are so ridged that they can knock your eyeballs out. I can only assume that where ever you live the roads are in pretty good condition.

Do you have a shock fork? No rigid 700C bike with 23/25mm tires can roll through a pot hole without knocking one's eyeballs out, unless its a really small pot hole -- more like a shot-glass hole. This is what we're dealing with in Portland this year: http://brooklyn-neighborhood.org/wp-...9.55.30-AM.png

Steel is no more magical than CF. Neither frame will eat-up major discontinuities in asphalt or cement. If steel were magical, it would be the material of choice for the Paris-Roubaix -- rather than the current crop of CF pogo sticks.

-- Jay Beattie.

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 5:29:11 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
Here you go, Tom:

https://janheine.wordpress.com/2017/...e-steel-bikes/

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Once again after reading Jan I am reminded of Peanuts.
http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1955/09/25

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 7:16:52 PM UTC-4, Doug Landau wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 5:29:11 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
Here you go, Tom:

https://janheine.wordpress.com/2017/...e-steel-bikes/

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Once again after reading Jan I am reminded of Peanuts.
http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1955/09/25

I like what he says about steel versus carbon he

"They now offer a performance that is difficult to equal with other materials. With performance, I don’t just mean speed – although the best steel bikes have no trouble keeping up with ti or carbon racers..."

and he

"What about the performance of a steel bike? We’ve tested our steel bikes against the best titanium and carbon bikes. We expected the steel bikes to be a little slower, but we were surprised: The best bikes’ performances were indistinguishable. (And quite a few titanium and carbon bikes actually were slower, because their flex characteristics didn’t work as well with our pedal strokes.)"

and then he says:

"One carbon bike was a tiny bit faster up a steep hill, because it was lighter. Once we equalized the weights of the bikes, their performance was the same. The extra weight of our bikes came mostly from the fenders, lights and rack. The frame tubes themselves don’t actually weigh that much. We added two full water bottles to the carbon bike, and it was as heavy as the steel bikes."

Did he not put two water bottles on the steel frame too? Why all the effort to make the carbon bike as heavy as the steel ones? The whole thing about carbon frames is that they are lighter than steel not the same weight. Sounds to me like he's soupting a whole big pile of El TToro Poo Poo.

Cheers

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 11:28:08 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:

This is what we're dealing with in Portland this year: http://brooklyn-neighborhood.org/wp-...9.55.30-AM.png

And I raise you these, on one of my regular loops:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index....59139#msg59139

Andre Jute
Pothole mister

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 9:45:48 PM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 11:28:08 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:

This is what we're dealing with in Portland this year: http://brooklyn-neighborhood.org/wp-...9.55.30-AM.png

And I raise you these, on one of my regular loops:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index....59139#msg59139

Andre Jute
Pothole mister

What gives here? McAfee Anti-Virus says this aboutt hat site:
"http://thorncyclesfor​um.co.uk/index.phptopic=8165.msg59139 URL entered (http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php topic=8165.msg59139 ) is not a valid website URL or has no data "

Cheers

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 1:29:11 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
Here you go, Tom:

https://janheine.wordpress.com/2017/...e-steel-bikes/

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

That's probably about advertising, or maybe Heine wants to sell bikes, like he sells "special" tyres. Me, I think Schwalbe's low-pressure tyres are special, and way beyond the resources of a mickey mouse operation like Heine's. The development of the most humble of modern consumer goods is usually the work of either an obsessive genius -- and very rarely at that -- or requires heavy capital investment for systematic institutional work. I don't spend my own time reading Heine; what he says that is of value to me will be retailed and regurgitated by people with more time than I have.

However, there is something special about steel bikes, the same way there is something special about a Bentley (and those Volvos which shared the same positive-feeling switch panels), quite beyond the snobbery of owning one. (Personally, I never washed or polished any of mine. Clean cars are for people with something to prove. When I was young, I drove filthy sunflower yellow Porsche, and the owners of polished, clean cars never failed to get the hell out of my way, because I calculated, correctly, that they would think someone who could let an expensive car get so filthy was probably also reckless about denting it -- or anyone else's car.) The easy way of proving that steel has something ali doesn't have is to measure it with your coccyx. This actually means "correctly proportioned steel", because the worst bike, on the Jute Coccyx Scale, I ever owned was an expensive Peugeot with the most beautiful fillet brazed steel frame -- on which the oversized tubes and the badly specified tyres relayed every minuscule ripple in the road to my back. My current fave bike for a long time now, a Utopia Kranich, is widely considered to be as stiff as necessary (it's a cross frame mixte rated at 170kg load, and you won't believe its roadholding and handling at amazing speeds on under-inflated balloons, precisely because the frame is so predictably stiff) but the whole experience is just cushy, *because the custom drawn tubes are correctly scaled*. I suspect that ali bikes are so unforgiving because the thick wall tubes make them so; ditto for the inflexible nature of the resin in carbon fiber bikes, which Tom Kunich pointed out recently.. I don't know about titanium (I'm too lazy to look up the facts in a book I wrote thirty or forty years ago), but all those notorious fractures make me wonder whether the tube wall thicknesses commonly specified in titaniumm isn't part of the problem, by analogy with ali. Though it is impossible to explain to the low-grade "engineers" one finds in cycling (RBT is specially privileged in having much more than its fair share of the better engineering minds in cycling), specifying bicycle tubes is more of an art than a cut and dried science, which is why some bikes are great, and some are boat anchors.

"Stiff but flexible" is the usual unimaginative sneering-jeering from the usual thoughtless clowns, but in fact steel is more *forgiving* than the other common bicycle frame material, except wood, which at bicycle cross-sections has other problems; at larger cross-sections, laminated wood can be superior even to steel.

Andre Jute
We're not yet finished developing the bicycle

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 3:28:08 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 1:24:56 PM UTC-7, wrote:

I sure as hell can tell you what bike I'm on with my eyes closed. Steel bikes have an initial flex and then harden up rapidly. This is nice on the pot-holed streets of California. All and I mean ALL of the other materials are so ridged that they can knock your eyeballs out. I can only assume that where ever you live the roads are in pretty good condition.

Do you have a shock fork? No rigid 700C bike with 23/25mm tires can roll through a pot hole without knocking one's eyeballs out, unless its a really small pot hole -- more like a shot-glass hole. This is what we're dealing with in Portland this year: http://brooklyn-neighborhood.org/wp-...9.55.30-AM.png

Steel is no more magical than CF. Neither frame will eat-up major discontinuities in asphalt or cement. If steel were magical, it would be the material of choice for the Paris-Roubaix -- rather than the current crop of CF pogo sticks.

Jay, don't tell me what I can and cannot feel. I heard that same crap when you didn't think a coasting bike on rough pavement would accelerate when it move upon smooth pavement. You sure as hell ain't no engineer.