In article <[email hidden]>,
(Tai) said:I bought a Marin steel - ok, Thron cro-mo - road bike a
few years ago and notice Marin now have aluminum road
bikes, at least at the low-end. Looking at other bike
makes, the selection of cro-mo road bikes under $1K is
getting smaller. I know aluminum bikes are a little
lighter, but are consumers making the choice to go to alum
and/or the makers finding alum bikes more profitable?
Aluminum has almost no price disadvantage over steel now,
for various mass-production reasons. Since an Al frame can
usually be made a little lighter*, all but the very cheapest
new bicycles default to Aluminum. And since some of the most
expensive and lightest bikes are also made of Al, you get
some cachet rubbing off on your "7005 ALUMINUM" Wal-bike.
Quoted message said:Wondering where steel bikes are going, Tai
They're just resting. I have been known to pay as much as
$10 for a complete lugged road bike at a garage sale. I
grabbed a half-decent 70s vintage Italian lugged frame out
of a pile of garbage last week; I don't even know what I'm
going to do with it, since it's pretty but I have lots of
steel frames already.
Unless you have some very specific reasons for it (you want
a special geometry or it's the cheapest way to get the
components you want), I don't see a keen need to buy a new
steel frame. If I was willing to spend a few hours looking,
I could probably bring home a decent-quality lugged steel
road frame every weekend, in most cases as complete 25-year
old bike, for $10 or less. Modern steel, especially in
welded, non-lugged frames, might have a slight weight
advantage, but it's on the order of a pound at most. I ride
a mid-range Pinarello with indifferent (105, Sora)
componentry, and it weighs only 22 pounds all in.
Quoted message said:P.S. I wasn't really asking for the pros and cons of steel
vs. aluminum, but more about market and consumer, um,
dynamics at the low-end of bike sales. :-)
The Taiwanese factories are very good at aluminum
fabrication, and the price difference between raw steel and
raw Al is not high. All the economic forces push towards
defaulting to Al. Only very cheap (and mostly children's)
bikes now use steel on the low end of the market. At the
high end, you get into custom fabrication or companies
marketing the cachet and positive attributes (repairability,
beauty, magnets stick to it, etc.) of high-end steel
construction. The middle is owned by Al.
*I have a theory that whatever the relative merits of steel
and Al for road frames, mountain bikes have a heavy natural
bias towards aluminum because an Al frame built strongly
enough to have a reasonable fatigue life will also be able
to take relatively high one-time loads. By comparison, steel
construction means not worrying about the fatigue life
(which can be assumed to be nearly infinite if you don't
exceed the yield strength), but that means you are building
a bike with a lower ultimate tensile strength in the places
where bike frames can fail. Road bikes don't get into a lot
of super-high-load situations unless they're being crashed,
but mountain bikes tend to get jumped, crashed, and dropped
routinely. Does that make sense?
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email hidden]
sfu.cawiredcolaOpen ↗ President, Fabrizio
Mazzoleni Fan Club
