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43 Comments
If your a racer, that's great. But carbon fiber is fragile. If you're a regular Joe who keeps their bikes in the garage where they could get a little scratched then carbon fiber is not for you. When I worked on a bike shop in the US, guys would come in wanting to shave a few ounces of their bike weight. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut. I wanted to tell them how much cheaper it would be to lose a few ounces off their body than their bike.
Flax fiber
I have a road bike made of magnesium and it is absolutely the most comfortable bike I've ever been on in terms of how it absorbs the road and I don't notice that it lacks any performance compared to a carbon frame.
Ok, so what's the maximum allowable diameter-to-thickness ratio of a tube or section in CFRP? Lateral stiffness matters too…
If you wrote up the stiffness & fatigue life targets accurately for a bike, you'll find that aluminum will get a lot closer than this composites engineer would want!
Weight doesn't matter unless climbing allot. Stiffness is about the same through all frame materials
Your all wrong, you can't beat a good old iron made bike
Great Information Brother 😎
3D printed frame is next
People who have been riding for several decades, once they reach an age where they have grey hair, and aren't racing, they tend to ride Titanium, if they have the money. If not, then lugged steel. For me, new carbon is nice for racing, but too stiff and highly overrated for daily commuting. I have a old (90's) Look carbon bike that feels good, but I don't use it everyday. Thanks.
Bamboo is one of the strongest tube materials you could find. Large diameter tubes, and they are less fragile due to the strengthening after every growth section. Replicating that in something like carbon fiber would be revolutionary. The problem with bamboo is that bamboo doesn't allow for arbitrary wall diameter and wall thickness 😅. And the lugged+glue frame design is also adding some weight for bamboo.
Carbon fiber is the disposable camera of the bike world.
Cervelo made very fast aluminum aero and TT frames about 20 years ago, as did Specialized. These could be made today and be more affordable than carbon frames while still being fast enough for 98% of the riders on the road. Unfortunately, most big bike brands treat aluminum as entry level today.
There are plenty of steel, aluminum, and titanium bikes available for build and sale. It all depends what you are into. Somedays I like steel, some days carbon, some days I like my old Klein (carbon and aluminum). Just because carbon is the material du jour doesn't mean it's the only material.
And the parrot speaks. Need to know they speak for the major brands. Have they ever said disc brakes suck or bike manufacturers still cant figure out how to make bottom bracket holes perfectly round , in tolerance, and concentric to each other.
Alloy is good if you don't look after your bike so much like myself 😂
Carbon fiber isn’t just extra stiff. If used properly it has an amazing ability to be stiff torsionally while providing vertical compliance. It’s possible to make an extremely stiff bike out of aluminum, but it would be extremely jarring over the smallest bumps in the road.
I think bike industry has to explore other options as hard plastic polymers, glass fibers, etc. For example, a good and hard plastic polymer can be really lightweight, stiff and really really strong, without even counting that is by far the most easy to produce and also even 3D print
My question is how well are low end carbon fibre models .e.g. Specialized expert rather than S-Works made? Is the cheaper carbon layed up for its best use.
What is this high performance that I keep hearing about? For the average cyclcist it doesn’t make much difference if they are riding steel or carbon fibre. Average cyclist is almost never going to compete, so all the grams and watts are not gonna matter all that much.
What about hemp?
If it strong enough to keep Formula one drivers alive it should be strong enough to survive most stressors of Road racing and be light enough to go fast.
High-quality steel can't be beat.
How about bamboo?
Magnesium. Been used on high performance car wheels for decades and suspension fork stanchions.
Still the amount of carbon used is same in terms of stiffness to a high end titanium steel or aluminum. It's all about shape now
Vibration damping of carbon is superior to all other materials
How about ability to recycle? Carbon is an environmental disaster, and cyclists of all people should consider this. Also, your average medium level amateur cyclist will not notice the difference in a blind test. This is a reality.
😂🤣😂😅…,i've got the newest fandangled extra light weight no weight in fact material known to man all the way from Wakanda otherwise known as Vibranium which is also as strong as nans apron strings 😂🤣😅
It is so unsustainable and bad for the environment though.
I mean if stiffness-to-weight ratio was the ONLY important factor, then this might be true.
I am not a racer – my bike is Ti.
The manufacturers like carbon because it fatigues and has a shorter lifetime. So they will sell more bikes, more frames, over a given number of years, if they can convince people to keep buying them and keep replacing them every 5-15 years. Steel is better if you don't want to buy a new bike every few years. And it's more repairable if you are touring around the world or country.
What about graphene?
Is it really all that important? It's all about wasting energy in a nice way
The advantages of carbon fiber in mass production are too good to overlook for bike companies, and so the narrative will remain the same
I like a springy frame.
carbon fibre, strong and fragile at the same time
3d printed stainless steel head and BB etc with 1mm wall thickness tube with butted style ends.
I resent shapable, just call it a cookie cutter bike and be done with it.
It's not carbon fibre, but carbon fibre composite. There are other composites like Dyneema. Without the resin, you cannot make a carbon fibre buke frame.
they are for sure and not mention at least one farmazonirze kurwa
I don't get that question because the bikes went through the iterations of frames from those materials before they used carbon fibre. Why go backwards unless you can prove a benefit beyond carbon fibre?
The problem is that carbon fiber is very unsustainable. It is simply the worst alternative for the climate. It is therefore a shame that we're moving towards replacing aluminum, that is super easy to recycle. And that's where we're heading, production costs and manufacturing is going to provide cheaper carbon bikes for all. Take tennis, badminton, skiing, all sports are developing in the same direction. From recycling to throwing away. And all because of extremely small gains, gains we really don't need for the sport to be a sport. It changes nothing. It just adjusts the form and limit and accessibility of the sport. There is no "goal" in and of itself with these material gains. While there is a huge argument for using more sustainable materials.