On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 09:43:00 -0400, Curtis L. Russell
<
[email protected]> wrote:
>On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 07:23:43 GMT, Howard Kveck
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Those are good points, and pretty much mirror my thoughts on these
>>frames. Particularly the longevity part (I'm riding a ten year old titanium
>>frame).
>
>So based on all the comments, it kind of begs the question, "Why?"
>What would motivate Reynolds to sell a frame set that only a very few
>framebuilders could do right and fewer probably would want to?
>Lighter? A belief that some cyclists will purchase anything that
>sounds cool in enough numbers to make the effort worthwhile?
One of the most enduring forces in the marketplace is "'New' will
always sell", which, allied with "Sooner or later, everything is new
again", periodically causes old failures to be resurrected, dusted
off, given a new name and touted as The Latest Thing yet again.
Sometimes the problems (if they were tech rather than marketing
mistakes) have genuinely been solved in the interim. Sometimes they
haven't. Sometimes new ones creep in instead, so that while the old
issues have been dealt with, the new ones still cause trouble. I
don't know which of the above will characterize the Reynolds magnesium
tubes. Their reputation for being right is awfully good; it seems
likely that if anyone is going to produce a non-troublesome magnesium
tube, it would be them. That, by itself, isn't enough to fully
convince me that these tubes are either trustworthy or likely to make
a splash in the marketplace, but I could be wrong.
As for the difficulties in working with magnesium, the welders who did
my alloy work years ago reported that in reality, the problems with
magnesium were not that hard to deal with. It could be a challenge to
find rod or wire of a compatible alloy, and shrinkage was a real
issue, but largely it was just a matter of selecting the right
equipment and learning the correct technique, as is true for a lot of
other metals. The real question is whether there is both enough
demand to justify the change, and enough improvement in this alloy to
make the result durable. Both of those questions are as yet
unanswered.
--
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