51–60 of 152 posts
> He ruled out magnesium, which is best per unit weight in compressive buckling but is brittle and difficult to extrude. There's a fascinating, and very new, class of nano-laminate magnesium alloys called Long Period Stacking-Ordered (LPSO) alloys. These are very lean -- the standard version is 97% Mg + 1% Zn + 2% Y -- and they have outstanding mechanical properties. At an equal weight, they're much stronger and stif…
A modern alternative are bamboo frames, e.g. https://my-boo.de
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Titanium frames have a devoted fan base. Personally, I tried to notice the difference back when I did road racing but didn't. Maybe I didn't want to: Ti ain't cheap.
What is cheap these days?
10-speeds are most common, so you have to be ok with that; although some vintage bikes did have 3 chain rings. Older road bikes tend to have narrow tires, because everybody thought they were faster; 1/4" tires are workable on unpaved mixed use trails, but 1/8" will be pushed around easily by tree roots and ruts.
It's interesting that trackies in the 70s were trying to reduce weight that much. I don't think it's perceived as especially advantageous these days. The high-ish end track bike I'm assembling now will be a little over 8 kg (almost 18 lb). We also race much bigger gears (typically 95-110 gear inches in mass start racing, bigger for sprinting) than mentioned in the article (72 gear inches). The position that is consid…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree
With his "old faithful" bike he built himself
I was looking at it in the museum last week and it still impresses me how intuitive he was about cycling. Things like integrating the pedal and shoe to save on height, and also reducing the q-number with the narrow bottom bracket.
I remember doing time trials with Graeme before he had created "old faithful" and he was just incredible
Graeme wrote a book on training a few years ago - its very home brew - but he was ahead of his time saying that you need to ride 25-28mm tyres on the road, rather than the 20-23 which were fashionable at the time.
> He ruled out magnesium, which is best per unit weight in compressive buckling but is brittle and difficult to extrude. There's a fascinating, and very new, class of nano-laminate magnesium alloys called Long Period Stacking-Ordered (LPSO) alloys. These are very lean -- the standard version is 97% Mg + 1% Zn + 2% Y -- and they have outstanding mechanical properties. At an equal weight, they're much stronger and stif…
I'm looking forward to a sleugh of articles telling me carbon frames have a really harsh ride quality and lack a certain "je ne said quoi" compared to magnesium frames.
With modern understanding of composites, and complex layups with UD fibre, the "not comfortable, too stiff" is less and less true. The reduction in road buzz I got when I finally moved to CF handlebars was noticeable.
I'm convinced titanium is a pretty optimal bike material. I hate aluminum frames, too stiff, some amount of flex makes a bike so much nicer. Hate carbon, too. Steel is nice. I've have a lite ghisallo frame which I think was under 2lbs. The whole bike is under 15lbs and still manages to carry my 200lbs of weight.
R.I.P. Sheldon Brown. I'm glad his pages still exist both as useful resource and as a time capsule of what the best of the old web looked like: useful, content rich, no ads, fast loading, stable urls.