It's All About the Bike (5 page)

We met up a few miles north-east of Stoke-on-Trent, on the moors, and rode along a ridge with grand views towards the Peak District. Brian knew every geographical feature in sight: this is where he trained when he was racing. He pointed to distant hills and described riding up them on single-speed bicycles; he recounted descents into steep-sided valleys on bleak days in forgotten winters, with failing brakes. Together, the stories created an alternative map of the area, with a distinct narrative. I remembered an Ernest Hemingway quote: ‘It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.'

Brian rode beside or behind me, examining my pedal cadence and analysing my position on the bike in different circumstances — accelerating, climbing, ‘watching the cows', descending and sprinting. We didn't go far. It was grey and the wind was scudding across the tops of the hills.

‘I've had a good look at you,' Brian said. ‘Back to the shop, then?'

There were a couple more incremental adjustments — saddle height again and the position of the brake hoods on the handlebars — before Brian got out his long metal ruler and started noting down the measurements of my frame in his notepad. Down on his knees, with the ruler pressed against the head tube and the seat post, he asked, ‘What's this frame going to be made of then, Rob?'

There were few sure things about this bicycle at the outset, but one of them was the frame material: steel. It's been the backbone of the bicycle for over a century. Until the mid-1970s, it was the only real option. Even in the early 1990s, the majority
of high-quality bikes still had steel frames. Today there are many materials on the market: aluminium, titanium and carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers are common, but you might prefer your personalized steed to be made from moulded plastic, magnesium, beryllium (a toxic chemical element found in minerals and used in rocket nozzles), hemp, wood and bamboo. In fact, bamboo is emerging as the new material of choice for socially entrepreneurial frame-building projects in Africa, though it was first used to make bicycles a century ago.

I've tried all the major frame materials. I've had aluminium road bikes with carbon forks, steel mountain bikes, aluminium mountain bikes, a steel touring bike, a titanium road bike, a fullcarbon road bike and an aluminium mountain bike with carbon seat stays. So which material, or combination, provides the best overall ride? I have my opinions on all the bikes I've had but I know they are affected by my personal experiences riding them: how long I had the bike, where I rode it, who I rode with. Objectively, I'd be pushed to say which material provides the best overall ride. I know from reading about it that frame materials do have different properties: in fact, some people eulogize profusely about the ‘ride characteristics' of this material over that. I'm not so sure. Such things are very subtle, and only measurable with sensitive engineering instruments.

There is much nonsense passing as wisdom about materials for bike frames. The reality is that a good bike builder can make a good frame out of any of the materials mentioned, with any desired ride qualities: if the diameter of the tubes, the thickness of the tube walls and the geometry of the frame are right, the bike will be right.

The poppycock really piles up when people talk about the
stiffness
of a particular frame material: this property of a material is measured by something called Young's
modulus
or
elastic modulus.
A
stiff
frame transmits the impact of every pebble and nick in the tarmac directly to the nerves in your gluteus maximus, that is, your bum, while a
flexible
frame absorbs the shocks. Most people who have ridden both aluminium and steel frames would say that aluminium frames are stiffer. Actually, steel has a much higher Young's
modulus
than aluminium — it is stiffer. It's just that aluminium tubes tend to be much larger in diameter than steel, and as a tube's diameter increases, its stiffness increases to the third power of that number.

In reality, the tyres, the wheels, the seat posts and the saddle proper absorb the bumps. The frame itself contributes little or nothing to shock absorbency. It's also important to remember that two frames made from different materials would not be made to the same tubing dimensions, making a relative comparison impossible. The frame feature that does have some bearing on comfort is the design of the rear triangle — the triangle formed by the seat post tube, the chain stays and the seat stays.

The most deceptive aspect of modern bike frames is weight. The frame of my newest road bike is carbon (Toray T-700 SC carbon, if you must know). It weighs under 3.5 lb. It's ‘Phwoarrr'-light. People who aren't familiar with modern road-racing bicycles pick it up and actually go, ‘Phwoarrr'. Unquestionably, the lighter a bike is, the easier it is to pedal uphill. But the industry has become obsessed with making bikes lighter when, for the vast majority of riders, the paramount consideration is not weight, but that a frame should not break in use.

Carbon fibre is currently the most popular frame material for elite professionals, largely because it is so light. If your absolute priority is having the lightest bike possible, because you're a professional cyclist and you need to shave seconds off the time it takes you to climb a 12 mile mountain road in the Pyrenees, to give you a competitive advantage, make a living and put food on
the table for your children, then you must have a carbon frame. For the rest of us, it's either an indulgence or we're victims of a conspiracy. Or both.

Yes, even the bicycle industry has a conspiracy theory. It goes like this: the manufacturers of mass-produced bicycles spend a fortune on R&D to ensure that the top professionals they sponsor ride the lightest, fastest bicycles, and win races. The manufacturers need to recoup this expenditure while reducing the costs of production, so they throw everything at marketing to the public the same, or similar, elite bikes as the pros ride.

My dream bicycle will be made from steel. Here's why:

1. Steel is very strong. High-quality steel has a very high
yield strength
or
elastic range
— the point at which it bends permanently rather than bends back to its original shape — making it durable and less likely to bend in a crash. This means that steel tubes can be thin, with a small diameter, making steel frames light and sufficiently flexible. As people like to say: ‘steel is real'.

2. Steel has a long life. When I visited Argos Cycles, a well-established frame-building workshop on an industrial estate in Bristol, I was shown several dozen steel frames dating back to World War II. There were frames made by some of the great names, such as Hetchins and A. S. Gillott, hanging on the wall, awaiting restoration work. They were about to be realigned, shot-blasted, rubbed down, primed and resprayed. Further along the wall there were several fully restored, gleaming frames waiting to be collected. They looked brand new. ‘Years of riding left in them,' Mark, the workshop manager, told me. ‘We have a near constant supply of steel frames in for restoration. Many are over fifty years old. A carbon frame simply won't last anything like that long.'

3. Steel is not prone to sudden failure: despite recent advances, carbon still is.

4. Steel is also easily repairable: aluminium, carbon and titanium are not. In fact, a small crack in the chain stay on a carbon frame often means the whole frame is destined for the bin. Crucially, steel can be repaired anywhere in the world by a man with a blowtorch and a welding rod. I know this, because I bent a steel bike in northern India, when I was riding around the world. I was slipstreaming a tractor on the Grand Trunk Road near Amritsar. We were going downhill at a lick when I rode into a pothole the size of a hot tub. There was no time to react. I had what American mountain bikers call a ‘yard sale'. The bike, panniers, sunglasses, water bottles, tent, pump, map and I were strewn across the tarmac. I lost a lot of skin but the bike took the brunt of it: the top tube and the down tube were both bent, leaving the front wheel shunted backwards, rubbing against the underside of the down tube. I wondered if my round-the-world ride was over.

It took me an afternoon to find the best mechanic, or ‘top foreman' as the locals called him, in Amritsar. Expertly, he removed the handlebars, the stem, the forks and the stressed headset from the head tube, while attendants handed him tools as a nurse attends a surgeon. Then he shoved a metal spike through the head tube and literally bashed the tubes straight again. It was terrifying to watch. Thirty minutes later, he'd reassembled the bike. The job cost me 100 rupees (about $2.25) and a packet of smokes. I still had 7,500 miles to go to reach home. The two bent tubes had to be welded again in Gilgit, Tashkent and then Meshad, in Iran, but I did get home, on the same bike. The bare frame, still bearing the wounds, is on the wall in my shed.

For years after my return, I was reluctant to take the frame back to the frame-builder, Roberts Cycles. The marks left by the Iranian welder were heinous. When I eventually did go back, I explained to Chas Roberts what had happened. He was delighted. He thrust me into the retail part of the shop where two men were about to wheel away their brand-new expedition touring bikes — one to cross America, the other to circumnavigate Australia. ‘Here,' Chas said, ‘listen to Rob's story. This is why you've bought steel frames.'

I have no immediate plans to head off on a trans-continental journey on my dream bike, and, anyway, it's not going to be a touring bike. One day, though, I plan to do some ‘credit card touring' on it — that's touring with no luggage except for a wallet. I hope to be off the map on it. I'll be in a town on a former slave-trading route at the foot of a great mountain range having the frame straightened by a bald welder with one eye, as children skip about shrieking, ‘Give one pen!' The frame has to be steel.

We know more about steel than any other material used to build bikes. This alloy of iron and small quantities of other chemicals has been a building block of post-industrial civilization. Today, 95 per cent of all bikes are still made from steel. Most of these are made in China and India from ‘mild steel', the cheapest, heaviest form of the alloy. If you've ever jumped on a bike in Asia and wondered if someone's tied a baby elephant to the back, you've ridden a mild steel frame. They are very heavy.

Most of the off-the-rack bikes for sale in western countries are made from lighter, low-carbon steel, generically known as ‘hi-tensile', or else they're made from aluminium. ‘Hi-ten' steel is still relatively inexpensive to produce, is durable, but is stronger than mild steel so less of it is needed to make a bicycle.

At the top of the pile are many high-quality, low-alloy steels.
All quality steel bikes are made from these senior-grade, light and tremendously strong iron alloys. There are several noted marques producing steel bicycle tubing: Columbus, True Temper, Dedacciai, Tange and Ishiwata. If you're British, though, one name resounds: Reynolds.

Alfred Milward Reynolds ran a factory making nails in Birmingham in the late nineteenth century. In his spare time, he obsessed about a problem that was then exercising the whole bike industry: how do you weld together thin, lighter-weight tubes without weakening the joints? Failure after failure led him to devise a tube with ‘ends a greater thickness than the body of the tube', as the original 1897 patent for ‘butted tubes' stated, but with the same diameter throughout, so saving on weight without compromising strength. It was a breakthrough for the industry. Bicycle manufacturers set about making the next generation of frames that were both strong and very light.

The Reynolds company went on to make motorcycle tubing during World War I, wing spars for Spitfire fighter planes, tubes for bazookas, wheel rims for Rolls Royces and Concorde engine parts, but this archetypal Midlands manufacturing business always returned to steel bicycle tubes. In the alchemy of designing aircraft tubing, Reynolds stumbled on a manganese-molybdenum
alloy that made wonderful bikes. In 1935, the company introduced ‘531' tubing. It was considered revolutionary. Even now, British cyclists of a certain age go misty-eyed and look away towards the horizon just at the mention of ‘531'.

For forty years, it was the benchmark of excellence in high-end frame materials. In all, twenty-seven Tour de France wins were recorded on Reynolds frames. Luminaries such as Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, LeMond and Indurain rode bikes made from double-butted Reynolds tubes. The long association between the professional peloton and Reynolds was broken in the 1990s, however, when elite cyclists turned to carbon and titanium. But just when it looked like steel might be abandoned, Reynolds struck back.

In 2006, the company discreetly introduced ‘953' — a lightweight stainless steel tubing for racing bikes. It has propelled steel alloy back into the premier league of tubing materials. This specially developed, low-carbon steel alloy containing nickel and chromium has superior strength, which means the tube walls can be extremely thin. It is the new benchmark, ultra-high-strength, steel alloy for bicycles. It's also resistant to corrosion. These outstanding properties make maraging steel, the group of iron alloys to which 953 belongs, useful in diverse fields — fencing blades in foil and épée, firing pins in automatic weapons, and in centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium.