Nearholmer wrote: ↑16 Nov 2022, 9:56am
it's a very expensive hobby/fetish imo.
I tend to agree. The weight saving over good steel isn’t huge once considered among all the other weights, those of rider, wheels, drivetrain etc, maybe something like 1kg in 85-100kg, but good titanium is still a lot more expensive than good steel.
I guess if you are deeply into weight-saving, and I know some people really pursue every last gram, it might be worth it to you, but personally, I’m not, and if I was would probably look first to my own waist, where I could lose weight and save money, by eating less.
The weight saving thing. Generated by the dominance of racing cyclist culture in Britain with all that stuff about marginal gains and the like, along with older foo-fah generated from hill-climbing championships, where everything was once drilled so much to lower the weight by 3 gms that the bicycle often crumbled before it reached the finish line!
There have been various marketing gushes based on new wonder materials, especially metals - magnesium and beryllium, even! More cracking, crumbling and so forth.
However, resin-enshrouded carbon fibre has proved the exception. It really is a rather superior material for making many things, particularly bike frames and wheel rims (for disc-braked wheels at least). Having ridden many bikes over the decades, I'll opine that the CF items have a significant, notable and very evident advantage over other materials in cycling manufacture -
if the design and construction techniques used are appropriate and done well. But then proper design and construction applies to any material, eh?
I've bent and broken steel frames. Aluminium frames have, after a lot of years and use, shown the odd bit of aging (some corrosion). The six carbon fibre frames we have in the hoose still seem as good as new - although the oldest in but ten and a half years old. So responsive, comfortable and quick, though.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes