rydabent

Quite frankly that bike reminds me of when I was a kid on the farm. Look where that seat is and where the handle bars are. It reminds me of an old hen with her butt in the air and her head down picking corn out of a cow pie.

cbrstar

Sadly he hurt himself but
This video really opened my eyes to what CF can do. As a kid who rode BMX I remember taking my Sisters Sears10 speed out and jumping it off a picnic table. The wheels tacoed, and the forks and handlebars bent. In fact I don't think there was a single piece of that bike that wasn't bent after. Later on I actually got into road cycling and one of my friends had a brand new Bianchi, with these stupidly expensive wheels that only had a few spokes in them. Just going off a curb or hitting train tracks and they would be bent.

I would like to get a CF bike but honestly two things keep stopping me.

1) Difficult telling if it's cracked. It's surprising but most sellers will object with you tapping it with a coin

2) Can't tell if it's FAKE. It's not like the good old days where jerks would swap a decal but knowing what traits to look for will save you heart ache. These fakes look identical!!! They just have low amounts of carbon in them etc. I'm sure there is ways to tell but I think it's way more difficult. I also feel like most of the CF breaking you hear about are fake bikes not made properly.

I think there is also a lot of diminishing value in CF. I watched a GCN video where they raced old vs new. And the old $100 1980's special was only something like 20 sec slower. Big deal in a race I agree, but for a guy like me that's meaningless. I could spend $10,000 on amazing CF but I'd probably be a few mins slower then a professional racer on a dutch city bike.

guy153

When Trek first started making CF monocoques around the year 2000 they probably went to an aircraft parts manufacturer in the USA and it cost a lot.

People got used to paying a lot for a CF bike and the huge cost savings of mass-producing them in China (not always to the highest standards) have not been passed onto the consumer.

But it's a free market and you can buy the same stuff (or what might be the same, caveat emptor) on Ali Express minus the trekgiantcannondalespecialized stickers for a small fraction of the cost. Or for probably only slightly more from YouTube sugar evangelist and life coach Durianrider.
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tomato coupe

No one wants to hear about the weird perverted stuff you did as a farm boy.

guy153

I thought the Tonka truck argument was pretty good. We acquire a prejudice against plastic from an early age.

It is actually an incredible material but familiarity breeds contempt. Would you rather have a plastic watch or pen or a metal one? Apple even make highly expensive computers and phones out of aluminium completely unnecessarily but because it's more desirable.

Of course CF is a higher performance material. But many people just like metal more.

Koyote

Preferences are fine. But people should not go around just making stuff up.

Eric F

Exactly. Personal preferences like aesthetics are completely subjective. Unfortunately, some people allow their preferences to interfere with objective reasoning.

Wileyone 

Some of us might.

(lockdown is boring)

UncleG

Sales will verify that steel frames have never gone out of style or demand. Exotics are nice, but steel seems to work just fine. I miss the lug art.

DangerousDanR

Tonka toys are TOYS and they are not made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Many modern tractors use plastics or composites for fenders and cowling because they are impact resistant, do not corrode, and can be pressure washed without being damaged. High performance cars often use carbon fiber drive shafts because they can be stronger and lighter than steel.

My steel and Titanium bikes are very nice because they are nice, not because they are made out of shiny rocks. As someone already said... "Of course CF is a higher performance material."

Wileyone 

Or you could just go ride your bike.

indyfabz

And we’ve never once seen his alleged trikes/bikes.

homelessjoe

I dont want to start any trouble but there are many steel bikes that are in the 10 to 15 thousand dollar range too dont ya know.......there is a waiting list to buy some of them

Trakhak

Steel bikes were effectively gone from bike shops from the early 2000s until recently. Even now, people frequently post on Bike Forums about how the only adult bikes they can find in their local bike shops are either aluminum or carbon fiber. For the most part, it's only in large cities with neo-hipster neighborhoods that you'll find a significant presence of steel bikes. A lot of us on Bike Forums are old and grew up riding very nice steel bikes, but most of us prefer the originals from the 1960s through the 1980s and have little interest in buying new steel bikes.

Koyote

Umm...what?

Camilo

I like it! Futuristic, hi tech and fast looking! And I love the aesthetics of classic metal bikes. Lugged steel or beautifully welded horizontal top tube ti with threaded forks and down tube shifters, for example. But I also love my "plastic" bike with modern shifters and the classic frames I've updated to such. It's all great!

That comment reminds me of a friend who truly believes that old heavy, poor handling, American, unwieldy, gas guzzling, technologically archaic cars that lack any safety oriented design features are superior to the wonderful things - visually and functionally - that are even the most basic modern cars. Remember the days when 100,000 miles on a car was a big deal? Drum brakes and boat-like handling?

It's a big world out there and modern stuff is really great for the most part. It's a shame not to have an open mind about all the variety of beauty and high functioning that is out there.

Camilo

But that position is really, really good for what that bike is intended to do, I would guess.

I'm trying to resist what I want to say about recumbent tricycles (and I happily owned and rode one for a while), since this, as is usual for bike material discussions, has turned into an exhibition of close-mindedness, and veiled and personal opinions being projected on others. When I see a (fairly typical) recumbent trike rider, or even when I was riding my own, I felt like or think of a person lounging on the couch watching tv with a beer perched on the big belly. But they're kind of fun to ride in an inefficient way, but talk about getting very little in performance or technology for the exorbitant prices!

guy153

Most bikes are basically toys if we're honest. I don't mean this as a criticism.

Plastic fenders on cars are a case in point actually. They're enormous, usually colour coded but don't match properly with the body, even from the factory, and are kind of ugly and plasticky. Classic cars that were metal all the way down plus a shiny chrome fender were definitely better looking. I'd rather be knocked off my bike by the new sort mind but I'm talking about the aesthetics here.

Trakhak

See title of thread.

Koyote

I know what the thread is about; I just don’t know what you’re talking about. And neither do you.

bruce19

I'm not sure how anyone would know if there is a "significant presence" of steel bikes in large cities that's any larger than at my club for instance. And, if any of that has anything to do with "neo-hipsters" (whatever that means). I am one of those old guys (soon to be 75) who grew up with steel bikes like a Bianchi Squadra and MAZA Prestige. I wish I had them back. But, my current GURU Sidero is a much better bike and weighs about 17 1/2 lbs. If I didn't have my GURU and was going to buy a steel bike it wouldn't be an old one. But, that's just me. I have no idea what "most of us" would do.

Trakhak

I sold a few Bianchi Squadras when I worked at a Bianchi dealership. Great bikes.

I'm soon to be 70, and I, too, grew up with steel bikes, but much earlier than you. First road bike was a Raleigh Blue Streak with Cyclo Benelux gears (with twin blue Coloral bottles in handlebar bottle holders), followed by a Reynolds 531 Helyett track bike when I started racing at age 13 and then, when I started working in bike stores in the early '70s, a string of American, Italian, and English pro-level road bikes, including a Bianchi Specialissima Super Corsa.

I'm surprised at all the resistance to what seemed to me to be a trivial observation: that the major bike companies had by the 2000s mostly switched from steel to aluminum and carbon fiber for their road and mountain bikes. I'm starting to think that I must have gotten that completely wrong. But I just now picked at random a 2005 Trek catalog to look at on line, and it looks as if everything in the catalog other than maybe one or two cruisers was either aluminum or carbon fiber. If there's a steel road or mountain bike in there, I missed it.

Trek might have been an outlier, and they did reintroduce some steel touring bikes at some point, but the only brands I remember having a definite steel presence in their lineups of road and mountain bikes in the 2000s were a couple of second-tier brands, GT and Jamis. If Giant and Specialized et al. had a bunch of steel bikes, I guess I wasn't going in stores that carried those brands and was unaware of them. Maybe I was brainwashed by the early Rivendell catalogs, which gave the impression that Grant was a lonely holdout against the onslaught of nonferrous bikes in the market.

guy153

The Trek 520 touring bike has always been steel. The switch to aluminium for most bikes seemed to coincide with production moving away from Europe to the far east. That might have just been coincidence of course. 520s were made in USA until about 2008, then possibly Taiwan for a bit, and now they're made in China.

UncleG

If I was in the market right now, I would concentrate on high end component road bikes from the 80s into the 90s. There are some beautiful bargins out there. I rather fancy a high end Raleigh with Campagnolo componants.

UncleG

I must have missed that. But I imagine the exoctics filter to markets with money to purchase them.

and I say that because it was probably two-and-a-half 3 years ago I took a neighbor's bike in to have some mangled component looked at...

I have my tools but I haven't set foot in a big box bike shop since the mid-90's. I have a mobile mechanic friend, if I want some real serious work done that is cost-effective for me and can be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time he usually shows up in the driveway & takes care of business right off his van.