What’s the best material for a bicycle?
This point matters: no material is better than another, but there is a material suited to each type of cycling, to each type of rider and to a different vision of cycling. Every material has its own properties and characteristics that make it more or less suitable.
One particularity of carbon is that its construction is formed by layers; this allows material to be added at will in the points we consider appropriate, giving the frame the mechanical properties the designer judges optimal for performance.
Weight also comes into play: we can build very light carbon frames, but they flex too much, although this is a point that still isn’t very clear today when compared with steel. Today there is steel tubing of extraordinary quality that could compete with the weight of current carbon frames. Some framebuilders are already producing steel frames at 850 g.
Right, I want a hand-built steel bicycle — now what?
Good — you’re looking beyond mass production and thinking about buying a distinctive steel bicycle.
What matters is knowing which bicycle you want, what kind of cycling you do and what you expect from riding. Hand-building a bicycle isn’t just a matter of taking body measurements, cutting, brazing and painting. That would only serve as a base for setting up the process, but it’s far more complex.
You need to know:
- How you want the bicycle to behave.
- The bicycle will interact with you — how do you want it to behave?
- How you want the bicycle to transmit energy to the ground.
It sounds complicated, but if you ride, I can assure you these are very easy answers.
When working on a custom bicycle, the design of the frame geometry involves many dimensions. Each one affects a particular variable. Some measurements focus on how the bicycle behaves, others on how the rider feels on it, and at the same time they are interrelated: hence the complexity of creating the perfect geometry for each rider.
Brands include geometry charts in their catalogues with endless data, adding new figures every season. But all this information is ignored by 99.99% of customers: they only look at the photo and the component list. The rest is secondary. Nobody thinks about how it’s going to behave. Let’s imagine two people who are 1.80 m tall:
- Do they need to ride the same size of the same model?
- Do they have the same arm, leg and upper body length?
- Is their flexibility the same?
- Do they have the same agility?
- What technical skills do they have?
Just as every person is different, so is every body: there’s no such thing as one bicycle being better than another — we all ride by feel. This is the most important thing, and it’s what gives hand-built steel frames their meaning.
What does a hand-built steel frame offer?
Resistance to breakage is the strongest point a steel frame offers, both under load and against material fatigue. As a result, it lasts longer.
It’s far more resistant to traction loads: for a bicycle built for touring, for example, it makes riding with panniers much more comfortable.
It absorbs vibrations from the ground much better, which makes it more comfortable. On dirt or rocky terrain it might sound trivial, but you really appreciate it. In short, steel is far more comfortable than aluminium, and even than some carbon frames. A good steel frame can be almost as light as a carbon one and, on top of that, has unquestionably superior damping properties.
The greatest benefit of all is that you can have a custom frame built, choose every detail you can imagine, the options you like most and everything you need. If you want the best out there, for life and 100% tailored to you, you should buy a custom steel bicycle.
I’d like more information
I’m glad to hear that. I’d be happy for us to talk and for you to ask me the thousand questions you have in mind about hand-built steel frames. I probably won’t be able to answer them all, but we’re all constantly learning here: we’ll wander a bit, we’ll talk about what you need from a bicycle, your riding style, and so on.
Drop me an email through the contact form and I’ll reply quickly; give me your phone number and we can talk by phone, WhatsApp or video call. Whatever works for you.
Steel is a material that, until a few years ago, had almost fallen out of use in the mid and high ranges of the bicycle market. But today, thanks to the framebuilders, the essence of hand-built steel bicycle construction is being recovered.
The hand-built bicycle construction process
Today, thanks to hand-built construction, you can have a bicycle with better characteristics than one from a catalogue.
For example, we can integrate it with:
- Disc brakes.
- Internal cable routing.
- Tapered headset.
- Thru-axles.
- BSA, Press-Fit, BB30 or T47 bottom bracket.
- Custom steel fork or carbon fork.
You might think catalogue bicycles already offer this and that it’s nothing new. But this is only a very small summary of the possibilities, which are endless. We’ll get to the most important one further on: custom geometry.
Quite possibly, if you’re not up to date with the cycling world, you’re thinking: what are you on about, an iron bicycle?
No, no, steel. A steel bicycle. The steel used today for the construction of hand-built bicycles can be made up of different elements; this is how alloys are obtained that can give the tubes very particular characteristics.
Steel is made up of a base material, iron, and a main alloying element, carbon. Thanks to carbon, steel’s mechanical properties improve dramatically. Depending on how much carbon is included in the alloy, steel becomes either harder and tougher, or more brittle and flexible. For this reason, the steel industry tends to use other elements to create alloys with the following characteristics:
- Cobalt: increases steel’s hardness at high temperatures, and is mainly used for making cutting tools.
- Chromium: raises hardness, resistance to abrasion and corrosion, and toughness at any temperature. It provides stainless properties.
- Manganese: increases castability and wear resistance.
- Molybdenum: is the most effective element for hardening steel, preventing brittleness and increasing its resistance to heat and wear. Along with carbon, of course.
- Nickel: when combined with steel, it provides anti-corrosive properties.
- Silicon: is an antioxidant and provides elasticity in an alloy.
- Tungsten: raises hardness.
- Vanadium: is used as a deoxidiser in alloys, creating very good resistance to fatigue and traction.
- Niobium: raises fatigue resistance.
The Columbus alloys
The most common alloy used in building steel bicycles is chromium-molybdenum, more commonly known as Cromoly. Other alloys exist — niobium-based ones, for example — though Columbus works with several different alloy types, such as:
- XCR (stainless, with a hardness rating of 1450 N/mm²).
- Omnicrom (hardness rating of 1300 N/mm²).
- Niobium (hardness rating of 1250 N/mm²).
- 25CrMo4 (hardness rating of 900 N/mm²).
- Cromor (hardness rating of 750 N/mm²).
For instance, the Omnicrom alloy is used only in the Spirit, Spirit HSS, SL, Max and Life series.
In this chart you can see how the hardness of two Columbus alloys changes when exposed to brazing temperature.
Yes, clearly you’re rather out of touch with what’s happening in the bicycle industry. But it seems you’re getting the hang of it now, and starting to realise that the cycling world isn’t only about carbon.
These bicycles aren’t intended for the general public; in the end, they involve hand-built construction processes where 99.9% of the work is done by hand. The rider drawn to bicycles like these is after something distinctive and one-off, far from catalogues where the customer has to adapt to the bicycle. Here, the bicycle is designed, adapted and built around the rider — their physiology, anatomy and biomechanics.
Some of the big catalogue makers are starting to give small nods to this revival — Bontrager, Kona, Specialized, De Rosa, Colnago or Eddy Merckx, who I mentioned in another post about Oliver Naesen riding one on the Champs-Élysées at the 2019 Tour — and plenty of others I’ve left out.
Where does it all begin?
This whole story brings to the page four figures from the world of hand-built steel framebuilding.
- Richard Burke: founder of TREK in 1975 alongside his partner Bevil Hogg.
- Gary Fisher: founder of Fisher Bikes in 1979, though he launched his first MTB bicycle based on a Schwinn in 1974, which he called the Schwinn Excelsior X.
- Keith Bontrager: founder of Bontrager; he built his first bicycle in 1979.
- Tom Ritchey: founder of Ritchey. He worked for Gary Fisher at the company Fisher founded with Charlie Kelly.
These four names created the history of mountain bikes as we know them today. They share a great deal in common — from being visionaries ahead of their time to the skills of craftsmen building steel frames with their own hands.
After many years in which the arrival of other materials in cycling pushed steel into the background — almost making it disappear — a new movement has emerged: small workshops specialising in custom frames built in steel. Craft work that can be considered affordable and that is taking over that slice of the market: the rider who knows exactly what they want and how they want it, and who would never buy something mass-produced.
