Bike handling

Each sort of material has its own specific pluses and minuses. And the feel of a bike using those different materials can be pretty dramatic.

Steel was the original high end racing bike and they were extremely well engineered by the mid-90's. You can hear people talking about how steel has a limited fatigue life but be that as it may, since it is EXTREMELY rare to have a frame of any material fail because of fatigue you can just assume that they never wear out.

The steel failures are in most cases from overheating and "hardening" high grade steel while brazing lugs. For this reason many frame builders that used very high grade steels would silver solder the tubes into the lugs which requires a lot less heating.

The weaknesses of bike handling of the lower grades is a "wiggle and bounce" reaction from the steel tubes bending under stress and then acting like a spring and rebounding. Reynolds tried to cure this with stronger grades while Columbus developed the SL and SLX which were thicker and so stiff that they were almost impossible to wind up to bounce. In the days when a 23 mm tire was considered monstrously large this made for a tough ride.

In the early 80's in order to lighten the bikes and yet not let them rebound all over the place they started using mild aluminum tubing. Rossin, Vitus and Allen were examples. These were lighter and rode pretty well but you couldn't do things like sprint or climb hard on them and keep control because their bending was not good for that sort of thing. Later companies started using higher and higher grades of aluminum culminating in aircraft grade. This allowed them to be very light and strong but they often also had the bending problems unless the tubes were heavier or the cross sections were very large. I think that Eddy Merckx company peaked this material with the Premium. This one made the strongest steel frames feel flexy.

Then Carbon Fiber came onto the scene after experimentations with Fiberglas failed to have any advantages. This material has had a great deal growing pains since you cannot build bicycles using any of the last century's methods. All of the thousands of years of combined experience building bicycles had to be thrown to the wind. On sure, originally you had some bicycle frames build in the older manner of lugs and straight CF tubes. These sorts of tubes are easy to make and you can in general go down to your local plastics store buy these tubes and then make up some aluminum lugs and made a workable frame. Look did a really good job of insulating the carbon from the aluminum and all of their early CF bikes are running to this day though if you didn't insolate them the least water would cause corrosion and failures.

Finally the Indian, Chinese and Taiwanese started real assembly lines for monocoque frames that didn't use lugs or any sort of thing and that could spread the loads over very wide areas and reduce peak forces instead of focusing them. When you use this construction method you can REALLY lighten the construction up.

Composites also have problems with the fact that they are fibers held together in a resin carrier. Earlier resins as were used in fiberglas composites had the property of continuing to harden over a very long period. Boat builders solved this problem by simply making the wall thicknesses so great that no matter how long it cured it always had far more strength than brittleness. But bicycle frames are light under any comparison and so they would grow brittle and the resin would fracture, breaking the carbon fiber under layer.

Various resins were tried until we presently have a thermoset resin that can but may not use a catalyst. At this point in time they seem to be very reliable. Boeing uses their entire aerodynamic sections composed of carbon fiber composites with thermoset resins. If you're afraid to ride a carbon fiber bicycle now you should be frightened into never flying again.

Advantages of carbon fiber is that it has a very low modulus of elasticity - it absorbs rather than bounces. And it has a low coefficient of expansion - it doesn't change size with even major changes in temperatures.

While you CAN find carbon fiber failures they have grown increasingly rare as the material and its production methods mature.

What is my opinion? I like the way that steel handles. But I don't like the way it bounces when you get it light. Now, with frames forks and wheels and tires you can tune the bike so that it is a very good handling bike for any particular course,

Aluminum and it's snootier cousin who is always looking down its nose at you - titanium - are in general simply so stiff that they must be tuned with tire sizes and pressures. But they are not bouncy and once tuned they are pretty good for all purposes.

Carbon fiber is presently pretty well developed. I had most of the carbon fiber Colnagos and they were mostly conventionally build using the "lug" system. Just Tuesday on a ride a friend brought his Colnago Precision which was a cyclocross bike with disk brakes but MAN - that thing was heavier than my steel Pinarello.

Now I have a middle of the line Colnago CLX 3.0 and I haven't ridden a better bike. It has every possible advantage of the composite materials though being Colnago it is a little bit heavier than it could be - 17 lbs in my XL size.

There is another material on the horizon - graphene. This makes lighter weight still possible and MUCH stronger strength. Graphene is more than 10 times stronger for its weight than steel. So when they really get to using it in composite frames you can pretty much discount them ever breaking. But that is still quite a ways off - though you can presently buy tires with Graphene armor on them to prevent punctures.

Now the most substantial difference between all of the materials is cost to the buyer. You can get a good steel bike for a reasonable price. You can get a great used steel bike for a CHEAP price off of Ebay. There was never a very large production of racing aluminum bicycles so they are a bit hard to find and medium priced when you find them. Let's face it - carbon fiber bicycles are just too damn expensive. But today more and more people are converting to it. Even those who had bad experiences with them in the past. This should help to bring the price down somewhat but that will probably take quite a bit of time because companies have to pay for equipment and engineering costs. Research and development is never cheap and companies can pull that money out of thin air.

 

I don't even know where to start...

 

That's just retarded.

 

Tell that to Sean Kelly. He won classics out the yin yang and the Vuelta France on early Vitus aluminum frames...and multiple stages (5) with his powerful sprint. He won the green jersey FIVE times!

The soft aluminium Duralinox fork was no detriment either. The glued together frame proves, once again, you're clueless.

ALAN not only had considerable success with the glued and screwed aluminum frames starting around 1972. They went to pioneer carbon fiber construction with great success. Jeezus! So stupid it hurts.

 

This statement is so retarded it doesn't even deserve a reply...

Ti is so flexy (you know...the opposite of "stiff") it is often hydro-formed and shaped so that it stiff 'enough'. Even then, Ti frames are noted for their smooth and soft ride quality.

Have you ever owned a Ti frame? I have. So damned 'stiff' that 32H / 3X Mavic Open Pro's on Campy Record hubs with 23 MM Michelin Pro 3's rubbed the inside of the chain stays. Yeah...really 'stiff', huh? It rides like a Cadillac though. Silky smooth with the tires at 105 PSI.

I've ridden Litespeeds, Lynskey's and a Moots. Only the Lynskey Helix was what I would call stiff. Again, serious tube shaping to achieve a degree of stiffness.

As far as "snootier" goes...WTF? You can buy a complete Ti bike for $1,500 to $2,000 from multiple retailers all day long. https://www.planetx.co.uk/c/q/bikes/titanium-bikes Nashbar blew out some Lynskey's last year for around a grand for the frameset.

 

Another WTF? statement. Can you possibly go even more full retard?

Don't answer that...you will. In very short order, sadly.

Ever hear of a company called Cannondale? I'm laughing so hard at your idiotic pronouncements that I can barely type!

OMG! The 'R' series and CAAD bikes, alone, probably amount to hundreds of thousands!

Thanks, tommy! I love it when you make another post full of fuck!

 

For this bit of stupidity, alone, you deserve a Darwin Award!!!

What a moron!

And no, tommy, I'm not even going to bother Google'ing and posting links to the great deals on the many inexpensive carbon fiber frames and framesets out there.

Please! By all means! Do continue posting your insane screeds! They're hysterical and continue to mesh perfectly with your past mix of lies, incorrect data and opinionated idiocy.

Honestly, tommy! I haven't laughed this hard since you posted that asinine statement that you can produce 600 Watts for an hour!

Maybe I should add a general disclaimer to this thread as I can already predict where you'll take it! "This is going to be good!"

 

5 seconds to find...$1306 for a complete carbon bicicyle.
https://www.ribblecycles.co.uk/ribble-sportiva-carbon/

 

$1151. Cheap.



https://www.planetx.co.uk/i/q/CBBATFASTRIV/battaglin-faster-sram-rival-22-road-bike

 

Ok, a lot of nonsense that someone else addressed as well. But one of the things is carbon fiber failures are NOT rare...not according to two of my LBS's in town who see more failed CF frames then any other material, it's their number one item they send in to warranty and a lot of the claims are denied. When something is so fragile you have to be careful to make sure the exact torque value is used in fasteners...well that's just plain crazy, and if you get the wrong torque info and something breaks to bad so sad you're tough out of luck; and some of the torque stuff information given by the manufacture even confuses bike mechanics who have to spend their time and delay repairs to send emails to manufactures to make sure they got the right info for a specific product, and that info can change as production moves along. When I witnessed a guy coming at me down a bike path and suddenly his CF handlebar on one side broke in two and not where the clamp was so it wasn't due to incorrect torque.

Graphene is far too new to even discuss it. You need to do some research before you start yakking away because graphene is in production as a bike too so it's not quite a ways off, a company called Dassi does make them but not very many have been sold (around 25) due to the starting price of $7,700. According to reviews the ride is harsh and unforgiving.

Your comment about Titanium comes from pure ignorance! Obviously you never owned one, and again you didn't even research the material before blabbing away otherwise you would have never said what you said. Ti is not stiff at all which is why they have to build with larger diameter tubing to get enough stiffness out of it. I've owned several steel bikes, a scandium bike (which rode like a brick), and a TI bike, I've also test rode many aluminum, other TI bikes, and CF frames and I can tell you that the TI bike I have is the most comfortable riding bike I've ever spread my legs over, even my touring bike with 6 mm wider tires and less PSI isn't as comfortable unless I load it up with 50 pounds of extra weight then it comes close.

If I didn't know better Cyclingtom I would say you had a few too many before you wrote what you did.

 

While I don't like Campybob's tone or appreciate his gratuitous profanity, I have to agree that Cyclintom's post is so full of inaccuracies and nonsense that it's hard to understand how anyone could post this. It definitely demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the history of the bike market and frame materials. I'm glad the others responded in detail to some of it so I don't need to.

FWIW, I've owned pro-level steel bikes since 1974, carbon fiber since 1977 (starting with an Exxon-Graftek), aluminum since 1979 (Klein) and Titanium since 1996 (Clark Kent & Litespeed). I also worked in the bike biz for 8 years. I think I've got a pretty good grasp of the pros and cons of the various frame materials. There is very little in Cyclintom's post that's even close to correct.

And what does any of this screed about frame materials have to do with the subject of "Bike Handling"?

 

That crap manifesto is so insane only a moron could read it without pissing himself from laughing so hard.

 

I just wonder if Cyclingtom did that manifesto on frame materials with the purpose to write incorrectly to stir the pot? or is he really that ignorant? If he's really that ignorant then I have no option but to think he's a troll and has never probably even rode a bike outside a tricycle he had as child, and probably weighs 450 pounds who has set for the last 30 years behind a computer all day on forums typing nonsense he has no clue about. I can't think of any other option except he could be suffering from Alzheimer and alcoholism but if he were other weird stuff (as if his stuff isn't weird enough!) like spelling, thought patterns and sentence structure would be way off, and it's not so I have think he's a troll.

 

The impression I get is that he's basically just clueless and doesn't realize it. I'm not going to make any assumptions beyond that. Supposedly he has signed off this forum for good as of a couple of days ago, so we probably won't see any more of this kind of uninformed nonsense. Hopefully, it will also reduce the level of vitriol here, too. We should be able to disagree without insulting each other.

 

As my father used to say, "That boy ain't right in the head!".

I seriously think his knock on the noggin did more than just land him with a concussion.

I don't believe for a minute that he's trolling. It's obvious he actually believes the stuff he posts...insane as it sounds to everyone else.

Claiming to measure the width of his shoulders to calculate his Cd for fantasy FTP readings? I wonder if he he took his upright position on the bike into consideration to come up with 600 Watts...

The most bizarre attribute to his rants were that they were the exact same absolute ignoring of reality that Alf used in his posts on the Campagnolo UltraTorque Click thread. The similarity was unnerving after I picked up on it.

For awhile I was convinced he was Alf's sock puppet. But, I don't believe that to be the case.

Once the complete lack of logic was thrown out the window it was on like Donkey Kong. I was hoping no one was even clicking on all that crap. My apologies for subjecting anyone with two functioning brain cells to all that.

You have to admit, that lunatic covered ALL the bases when it came to being completely wrong about everything he posted. I just rolled my eyes and laughed at him silently for months. When he laid into that newb that wanted to know if he had any potential for success as a competitive cyclist...well, i said it in the first line of my reply, "This is going to be good!".

 

I assume Alf has left the building as well?

I wonder when the next nut will come so we can all have a good laugh?

 

No. Alf's still here. And still butthurt about his idiotic "1 MM Air Gap" bullshit and the moronic "Q-Factor" pronouncement. A dimension that is neither adjustable or easily measured.

He jumped in a couple of the threads to defend tommy. My sock puppet radar was sounding off with all kinds of alarms, but I'm still not convinced they are one and the same. However, they do both appear to suffer from the same lack of common sense and logic.

Alf is good with shimaNO components. It's within his wheelhouse. He also...for some weird and unknown reasons other than perhaps being a tightass...knows how to mix Campy and shimaNO drive train components and get them working. The world is still trying to figure out if there is a question to that answer, but apparently he has that answer.

I claim to NOT be a shimaNO expert. Yeah, I've got a 105 5800 bike and an Ultegra 6800 bike and can set it all up and keep it working...not that much is needed. I've done all the simple shit from installing chains (easier than Campy), changing out a crankset to lose the OEM compact version, adjusted the front derailleur after raising it and getting some advice here from...can't remember his name, but he was a shimaNO tech at a bike shop in Colorado. It much more difficult than Campy. Read shimaNO's instruction doc for setting up the cable routing! It's INSANE! Technically, it requires a measuring gauge to correctly determine which side of the clamping bolt the cable is routed on to provide correct shifting! Get it backwards and it still works, but not as the manufacturer intended. Downshifts took two swipes at the shift lever, not the one that is required if it's set up correctly.

Oh yeah. My track bike has a Dura-Ace crankset. But, please. Don't tell anyone!

 

I haven't seen either of the threads that you mentioned, but what makes you say that Q-factor is difficult to measure? If the crank is on the bike, it's a simple matter to make a mark on either the seat tube or down tube, measure to the pedal mounting surface on both sides and add the dimensions. If the crank is off the bike, assemble it with the crankarms facing the same way and measure the Q-factor directly.

Unless the crank has interchangeable spindles, it's not possible to change it in any meaningful way.

 

Measuring it to + or - .020"? You could vernier it from opposite side of seat post times 2 and subtract the width of the seat tube if you could get an accurate measurement on the seat tube (generally pretty tapered on a carbon frame). If I were doing it I'ld just put the frame on a granite table, level the crank swing and use a height stand. But, that's all irrelevant...

Assembling with the arms pointing the same direction assumes the Hirth joint is perfectly machined. Any error thrown out 170-175 MM will be significant.

A measurement will give you a base point, but does not take into consideration the manufacturing tolerances of any given crankset. As a guess on two carbon arms boded onto the spindle halves in fixtures, there's probably a millimeter total stack error, not taking into consideration any curing draw after fixturing.

You are correct in that the Q factor of an UltraTorque crankset can not be changed from whatever it is out of the box.

Once the 10 MM fixing bolt is tight, it is what it is. If you shim the crankset too tightly, the bearings bind. If the spindle is only shimmed with the factory wave washer and the bottom bracket is anywhere in the same county as 'in tolerance'...tightening the bolt gets the Q factor right where it should be. Anything in between is...the same. The only change is pressure on the bearings if a wave washer is used in conjunction with shims, etc.

Tightening to torque spec vs. going all cheater bar on a 10 MM hex key really doesn't change things more than a couple thousandths. Trust me. I've had so many of them apart and back together again so many times I could probably do cross bikes in between swaps without breaking a sweat.

I've made complete sets of shim spacers in .001" increment out of brass, aluminum and Delrin. I also semi-purposely roached a pair of bearings just to see how long a tight setup (zero end play) would last. I've installed the bearings correctly and backwards on purpose. I run one, two and three wave washers and I've tried no wave washer. I've used every type of grease in my garage. I've experimented with four different Loctite bearing retaining compounds and assembly adhesives. I've isolated every component on the bike to get down to the last tick, click and clunk that BB could make.

In all of this there has been one constant. The Q factor. It does not change. Tighten that bolt and it's just...there. And most certainly I have NEVER, EVER ridden with a 1 MM 'air gap' separating my crankset half shafts at the Hirth joint. Caveat: My torque wrench is only good to + or - 4% once off the bottom of its range.

Alf seems to think you can actually ride an UltraTorque crank with a 1 MM 'air gap' separating the Hirth joint faces. Well...you can. You can ride it with the cranks halves wobbling because there's nothing to hold them in alignment until either the bolt snaps or (more likely) the face of the threaded half of the spindle cracks and snaps off. Both types of incidents resulting from insufficient tightening of the bolt are pictured on the web.

And we all know what generally happens when your crank arm comes off the bike while we're pedaling. And it ain't usually very pretty.

And we (Colnago C60 and myself), starting off from polite and specific with the insane moron that can't comprehend the basic design attributes of something as simple as a two-piece crank spindle and how it's held together on the bike and why it's making the noise and what, exactly eliminates it...page after page after page...well...

Not even the postings of the Rogue Mechanic's identical fix...as well as others from the web that discovered the same repair procedure independently...would convince to guy that the Q factor BS was obfuscation and nothing more. Neither could you convince him there was no '1 MM air gap'.

I honestly thought I would never see anyone as far out in left field as Alf. I have been proved wrong with the adventures of tommy.

 

Start from behind the fat guy and work your way further back. Citizen racer PansyBob. Better yet don't start at all - play your video game that gives you hundreds of thousands of feet of climbing in your feckless imagination.