The feel of steel makes it real

When I ran my framebuilding business in California during the 1980s; occasionally a member of the general public would stumble into my frameshop. They would invariably ask two questions and at the same time try to answer themselves.

The conversation would go something like this. “Oh, you make bicycles. Who do you make them for? Schwinn?” The second double edge question was, “What are they made of? Aluminum?”

In the eyes of Joe Public at that time, there was only one bicycle company in the whole world, so anyone building bicycles had to be subcontracting for Schwinn. And racing bicycles had to be lightweight so therefore they must be made of aluminum.

I would have to go though the motions of explaining that the frames were made of lightweight steel. My customers at the time were knowledgeable people who knew that a high tensile steel was the best material for a quality frame for a road bicycle.

The serious road bicycle never caught on with Joe Public. Those dropped handlebars were uncomfortable, and the tight shorts and little white socks? Now that wasn’t what you call manly. Then came the Mountain Bike revolution. The Mountain Bike was the SUV of the bicycle world. Big, chunky, and very manly.

The truth is to enjoy a road bicycle to its fullest extent requires a certain amount of dedication. It is like the difference between jogging, giving the appearance running but taking tiny steps and moving at the speed of a brisk walk, and serious running, taking long and high strides, moving at a fast pace. If you hop on a road bike only once a month it will always feel uncomfortable.

Unfortunately it is the masses, Joe Public, that keep manufacturers and retailers in business. Manufacturers of MTBs found that aluminum was cheap and easy to weld together. Forget the ride quality; the people buying these bikes were only going to ride them once in a while anyway. Aluminum was an easy sale; in the eyes of Joe Public buying a bike for the first time, aluminum was lightweight so it must be good.

Then there is titanium. The cold war came to an end in the late 1980s and with it came an end to making armaments and a subsequent world glut it titanium. Russia dumped tons of the stuff on the market; I remember people calling me nearly every day trying to sell me cheap titanium tubing. Today titanium is something like $30,000 a ton, making for some very expensive bicycles.

How about Carbon Fiber? Wow, that’s the stuff they build Stealth Fighter Airplanes out of; you can’t get any more high tech than that. And it’s super lightweight. But again the manufactures of the carbon fiber materials look after their biggest customers first; in other words the aircraft industry. Bicycle manufactures are small fry in their eyes and so get charged a premium for the material; making the finished product very expensive.  

“Steel is real,” is a catchy slogan being banded about by people in the know. Why? It is all about ride quality; a steel frame is like a very strong steel spring. It absorbs a certain amount of road shock and when the rider makes a sudden effort it has just the right amount of give, but at the same time quickly transfers the rider’s energy directly to the back wheel. It is called responsiveness.

Many people who ride road bikes do not race but simply ride for exercise and the pure pleasure of riding. Let’s face it you can burn just as many calories on any old bike, but if you make the experience pleasurable it is no longer a chore that exercise can become. If you ride a bike for pleasure, then why not ride a bike that is a pleasure to ride?

Even so steel is a hard sell. To those looking at the latest carbon fiber; steel seems like ‘old tech’ and therefore inferior. There is a whole generation of road riders who have previously ridden mountain bikes made of aluminum and carbon fiber, and have never experienced the feeling of a quality steel frame.

Steel has other advantages like longevity and reliability. Case in point; the frames I built in the 1970s and 1980s are still being ridden and enjoyed. A steel fame will not fail suddenly and dramatically; it will not disintegrate in a cloud of dust as some CF frames have been known to do.

You can crash on a steel frame and you can straighten it out or repair it and safely ride it again. Crash on a CF frame and you have no idea what damage you have done to fibers inside the frame that you cannot see.

Will steel make a come back? I believe so, but slowly. And it may not be steel’s ride qualities that bring it back, but rather law suits and warranty problems brought on by failures of other materials. If and when that happens manufactures will not state that as a reason, but will sell the ride quality of steel.

I am just an old fart who used to make bicycle frames so why should I care? No reason really; except for the satisfaction of being able to say, “I told you so.”

Brazing vs. Welding

I occasionally visit bike forums to see what kind of questions bike riders are asking and occasionally I will post a reply if I think I have an answer. I try to stay away from anything controversial as people can become pretty hostile on the Internet; especially when they are posting under a pseudonym.

Just like the idiot who screams abuse at the cyclist as they drive by at speed; they do it because they can do so with anonymity. So does the occasional poster on a forum; he screams abuse on the Information Highway.

Recently someone asked, “Why are frames brazed instead of welded?” He had taken a welding course at his local community college and the teacher had told him that welding was much stronger than brazing. This was my response:

“Traditionally frames have always been brazed not because a weld would fail but because the tube would fail right next to the weld due to the tube being very thin. Many bicycle tubes are heat treated to strengthen them. The trick in brazing properly is to apply enough heat to make the lugged joint but not to get the tubes too hot over a large area; thereby retaining as much of the tube's inbuilt strength as possible.

A properly brazed lugged joint is tremendously strong and a lug spreads the stresses over a larger area, not pinpointed in one place as with a weld. This is also the reason lugs are cut into curved or other fancy shapes, and not just cut square like a pipe fitting. A square edge would create a stress point and the tube would likely fail at that point.

To sum up; yes a welded joint may be stronger, but in any structure there is no point in making a joint far stronger than the material you are joining. And if the structure is stressed enough the material will fail before the joint.”

Notice I started my post with the word “Traditionally.” And actually the question was wrong because frames are welded these days. And I should have known better than to post something like this, because every propeller head engineer who knows welding theory up the wazoo would jump on it like a kid on a merry-go-round. The next thing I know the subject is being debated.

The truth is that frames were brazed for about a hundred years from the bicycle’s invention up until the late 1980s, early 1990s. About the time I got out of the business. Not just lightweight bikes but all bikes. Actually during the 1980s welding technology had reached a point were I could have welded frames that I built. But I did not because at that time it would not have been accepted by my customers; anymore than a sloping top tube would have been acceptable.

Mountain Bikes changed all that. You had a whole generation that had grown up with welded BMX bikes. BMX bikes had small frames with sloping top tubes so little Johnny would not ruin his chances of reproduction in later life. So the MTB frame began to look more and more like an adult size BMX bike with gears.

Early mountain bikes were built with lugs and had level top tubes. So the BMX bike had more influence on today’s bicycle design than the first mountain bikes. Other influences on the acceptance of welding were frames built in other materials that cannot be brazed like aluminum and titanium.

Once a new style has been accepted you cannot go back. I could not go back to running a viable business building lugged frames even if I had the desire, which I don’t. And the truth is whether a frame is brazed with lugs or welded; either is far stronger than it need be.

Footnote: If you are interested in welding as a vocation, this might be a place to start: "How to become a cetified welder."

History Lesson

1968 Pugliaghi. Everything clamp on even the bottom bracket gear cable guides. Pictures from TheRacingBicycle.com

In the late 1950s through the early 1970s there was a slump in bicycle sales in Europe. In the 1960s the economy was booming and although in many places the bicycle had always been the mode of transport for the working classes; many were now buying cars for the first time. At the same time the fitness craze had not yet begun; that started in the 1970s.

Racing bicycles and framebuilders were also hit by this slump and the price of a frame rose very little in that decade even though inflation did. Framebuilders had to look for ways to cut costs and one of them was to leave off all braze-ons. Building a frame without braze-ons does save a considerable amount of time and therefore labor costs. The only braze-ons seen in this era was a chainstay stop and sometimes a little stop under the down tube to prevent the gear lever clamp from sliding down the tube.

Having done that framebuilders could not tell their customers they were doing this to cut costs, hence the story that braze-ons weaken the frame. I think Cinelli started it; framebuilding was never their main source of income (Handlebar stems was.) so the price of a Cinelli frame was always high. So everyone’s thinking was if Cinelli can get away with it so can we, and they followed suit.

Do braze-ons weaken the frame? Maybe very marginally but then so does brazing the lugged joints; it is part of the framebuilding process. I have seen down tubes break right at the clamp on gear lever. Clamps require more maintenance they collect moisture under them and if they are over tightened they can dig into the tube and start a stress riser. But I feel if anyone is restoring a bike from this era they should keep the cable clamps they are authentic for the period.