get that thing out of my face welcome to today's episode of [ __ ]
bye fit tuesday today we're going over you i'm making me morning coffee today's
episode of bite fit tuesdays we are going over frame material
if you're in the market for a new bike watch this video first because you might learn something cool
and new about current bicycle offerings is this really bike fit tuesday sir because
it's not bike fit related at all is it frame fit saturday fridays brain fit friday that's catchy
so we're gonna start with aluminium aluminium gets a bit of a hard wrap and it tends to
uh cover the kind of low end of bicycle road bikes so your entry-level robots will typically be made
of aluminium they tend to come with carbon fiber forks but it depends on the kind of price point
using this as a representation is is a bit unfair because this is probably the
best aluminium frame to have ever blessed the earth uh cannondale once upon a time did make
good quality bikes uh this one was handmade in the us this is a cannondale cab nine
and frankly represents probably like the best mix and blend of performance comfort weight and what
have you this was back in the day was chasing down carbon frames in terms of weight and stiffness
aluminium as a material tends to be quite rigid so from racing standpoint can be pretty good
one of the drawbacks of aluminium though is that it tends to trans it tends to be really
good at transmitting vibrations to the rider so one of the one of things that cannondale uh
one of the first brands to uh to adopt was uh hydroforming techniques to basically use tubing
profiles to improve compliance in the frame so you can see on this bike that you the the seat stays
uh are stamps to be narrower then they're put into an hourglass shape to offer a bit more compliance
to the right but typically aluminium frames are tig welded there are several different grades of
aluminium and those different grades will offer different strength different weight different
compliance characteristics one of the benefits of aluminium uh particularly from a race standpoint
is you can dent a tube and the the whole the bike will still be completely ridable
actually once upon a time i put my bike on a train to go down to bath to see my mate tony
and uh some dropped his bike on my cat 10 i had a later generation cannondale and
dinged the top tube i think it was only about three weeks old at the time and it was it ruined
my week but anyway the bike was absolutely fine and you can carry on riding with no problem at all
in certain instances with carbon fiber and we're going to get onto this a little bit later in
the video you can have a situation where you see sort of delamination occurring if you've got some
impact of the frame so yeah with aluminium you can potentially you can crash it you can you can ding
it it's a little bit hardier because it's a metal frame so uh it tends to try and it tends to be
a good material for budding races it can be just as stiff and just as light as carbon fiber
uh what it what it tends to lack is the compliance factor so an extra representation is a
prime example of how not all carbon frames are created equal carbon fiber bikes come in a million
one shapes and sizes it's becoming one of the more popular materials to make bicycles out of because
it is cheap it's lightweight it's durable it's extremely strong to debunk a myth about carbon
fiber's brittleness which i feel stems from sort of the early 2000s whereby people thought that if
it kind of fell over it would break well there's a reason we make f-16 fighter planes and formula one
racing cars out carbon fiber it's extremely strong it's got a very high impact resistance so as a
result we can use a lot less of it and that's what tends to yield the lightness in the frames carbon
fiber we're seeing is is by far and away the most it's probably the best value for money performance
material because you can you can build a carbon frame very very cheaply and relatively speaking
and and get an incredible amount of performance out of it carbon fiber frames have advanced to the
point now where you're seeing incredible quality at a very very low price so for example at sort
of one to two thousand pounds you're getting a carbon frame that would have been you know top of
the range quality in terms of ride quality and and performance 10 15 years ago ultimately they're all
pretty much made in far east so they all come out of the same factories not all frames are created
equal something like this tends to get you get you tend to get a lot more feedback from it than you
will do a mass produced frame but a lot of that's built into the fact that i mean you know this is
almost an 8 000 pound bike frame so uh as with all of the other frame materials not all frames are
created equal just because something is carbon fiber doesn't necessarily mean it's an equal
to you know something that costs three times more there are different construction methods there are
different levels of quality in the raw materials also where they may have a massive impact on the
overall uh the overall cost and build quality of them one of the negatives of carbon fiber is that
it's very good at hiding damage so quite often you will have aesthetic layers um over the top of the
structural layer because carbon fiber as a as a product or carbon fiber products typically are
comprised of a series of layers which are then bonded together with epoxy resin and put into a
port and put it into an autoclave heat it up and put it under pressure if it sustains an impact you
can end up with a situation where the structural legs are damaged but the aesthetic layers aren't
because typically the static layers can be a little bit more flexible so as a result you
can end up with hidden damage quite often i mean there are speciali there are specialists in in
certainly in our area that provide um both common fiber inspection and repair services
and uh yeah that's something typically results in the need to x-ray i think can be costly and
i would i'm not entirely convinced on the longevity of it personally but ultimately in terms
of performance for your money particularly for racing carbon fiber is pretty hard to beat it's
light stiff strong and cheap it's worth noting the forks which is this part here that the front
wheel inserts into almost always made of carbon fiber even on aluminium steel and titanium frames
again it's a compliance thing so it tends to help absorb vibrations from the road that's something
i didn't even talk about with carbon fiber is is typically due to the layering nature of it
it tends to be very good at damping and absorbing vibrations from the road again though it's not all
carbon frames created equal particularly when you've got a deep truncated aerodynamic tube
very very good at transferring vibrations versus something like this which is a little bit slimmer
will typically be a lot more compliant so two profiles also play a
large role in how a bicycle rides even with a carbon fiber frame
steel still gets a pretty bad rap and a lot of people think that it it's a it's an
old fashioned material and and to a certain extent it is you know british british frame builders were
you know the best in the world once upon a time with british engineering we're very good at
building things in sheds steel is very easy to be built in a dirty environment as with carbon
and aluminium there are several different grades of steel so you you know right at the bottom end
you've got your sort of pig iron chromoly stuff which is very very heavy and uh tends to be plain
gauge tubing which means that they don't extrude any material from the inside of it i'll talk about
that more of that in a minute all the way up to something like this which is a columbus xcr
stainless steel this is very very expensive this is also tig welded so rather than being uh brass
braced or lugged it's it's too welded so the tubes are physically welded together uh which tends to
a lighter again more compliant frame steel is my preferred material to to ride road bikes for on
the grounds that it tends to be a little bit more organic i feel that it handles better because it
isn't quite as rigid uh it's typically a little bit more comfortable than a lot of carbon frames
but it it can rust for a star is one of the is one of the main negatives typically depending
on the value or so depending on the on the quality of steel it can be heavier but you know
this bike weighs seven and a half kilos so you know you can you can also see that you
get something very lightweight in the last decade we've seen a real resurgency in steel coming back
to the bicycle industry it's typically in the custom realms i mean independent fabrication
is is one of them and this is an american brand but certainly in the uk we're seeing like i said a
massive resurgence from people like our friend rob quirk who builds beautiful frames if you haven't
if you haven't heard of him you should go and check him out oh and actually rob did something
very cool in terms of rusting he made my other mate dylan a stainless steel bike yes because he
was worried about it rusting because he works on a boat rob's even using 3d printed components now 3d
printed bottom brackets or dropouts of things so steel is definitely coming into the new age it's
definitely a much more of a connoisseur's kind of choice it's it's not the rafa condo
team would have you believe that it was really really great for racing i'm not quite so sure
but certainly for kind of longer distance stuff it can also be more easily repaired you know you can
re-weld it and you can patch it uh so you know if you're in the middle of you know deepest darkest
china or something then you can have the thing re-welded typically steel frames tend to be at the
slightly higher end of the market and you know so you you're generally talking customized there are
you know other other brands out there like fairlight for example who build off the shelf
steel frames out of like reynolds 853 which is a kind of mid-level steel in conclusion it's
comfortable it can be lightweight and it it has like a really nice organic ride quality but it
tends to operate at a slightly higher price point you don't really get finer representations of
titanium than moots who are handmade you know and steamboat colorado uh we do also carry number 22
uh independent fabrication to a titanium frame and stellable our new brand which we're going to talk
about in a bit it's worth noting that titanium frames again as is with the case with all of
the other materials they're not created equal this is potentially a very unpopular opinion
but far eastern or cheaper titanium frames are really worth buying they
ride like aluminium bikes for the most part uh they're typically quite a lot harsher uh and
one of the things that we've come to find particularly with cheaper titanium frames is the
usually when you if you look around the welding areas they typically overcooked so when i say
overcooked i mean the the framework has overcooked the tig welder which what that means is you end
up with more expansion and contraction of the material and essentially it yields a more brittle
joint so essentially the frame fails titanium as a material is very very difficult to work for is
very difficult for it's very difficult to work with it needs to be built in a very clean very
sterile environment therefore it doesn't work very well in british sheds it also needs to be
saturated and argon gas when it's being welded now if these prerequisites aren't met you end up again
with a a join that isn't is quite brittle so this is part of the reason why titanium frames are so
expensive because it's just really difficult material to work with what you get though
is a similar quality in similar ride quality to steel but it's a little bit livelier the material
typically is a bit lighter something that i didn't mention about the steel frame and it's
also the case with aluminium in fact we'll just say blanket statement across metal frames there is
a process known as butting what butting refers to is uh where they extrude material from the inside
of the tube you've got single butting double butting triple batting and there's things like
ultra butting which is where they take loads of material what it means is that you end up with a
welding point that is the stack the standard gauge of the tube and this part is thinner which is then
thinner here and thinner here the thickness of the tube tapers as you get towards the middle of
the tube what that yields is a lighter weight naturally because you're taking material from
the inside of the tube but you'd also get better compliance properties from it as well to summarize
again in my opinion titanium is the sort of the creme de la creme of ride quality for
for particularly road bikes but also gravel bikes because you get a lovely ride lively ride quality
good levels of compliance um and it tends to be pretty lightweight and durable it's got very high
impact resistance very strong it does certainly tend to be a lot more expensive or in my opinion
it should be a frame like this is six seven thousand pounds if you're thinking about spending
two three thousand pounds you're better off with a high end steel frame than you are low-end tie
frame that marks the end of today's episode let us know in the comments what material frame
are you riding do you like it is it something weird because we covered four here but there's
certainly some extra ones for example bamboo you all come across a bamboo frame yeah was it weird
yeah i mean what do you think of bicycle friends made out of bamboo that's what might have happened
in vietnam might know if we got lost in the jungle for much longer would have had to fashion bicycles
out of bamboo but to replace lawrence's bike yeah if you want to check out james's shop i'll put a
link down below where you can book a bike fitting please like comment subscribe and see you guys