Originally Posted by
Airburst
An alloy is basically a mixture of two or more metals. In the bike industry, "alloy" tends to be used to describe parts made from an alloy that consists mainly of aluminium (i.e. "aluminium alloys"), despite the fact that a lot of steel bike parts are made from alloy steels, and quite a lot of titanium parts are made from titanium alloys.
pure aluminum is butter soft in thin walls.
the auto industry liked to call aluminum alloy wheels "mags" because many of them contained some small percentage of magnesium, but in fact virtually all of them are mostly aluminum.
here's a typical aluminum alloy, 6061...
- Silicon minimum 0.4%, maximum 0.8% by weight
- Iron no minimum, maximum 0.7%
- Copper minimum 0.15%, maximum 0.40%
- Manganese no minimum, maximum 0.15%
- Magnesium minimum 0.8%, maximum 1.2%
- Chromium minimum 0.04%, maximum 0.35%
- Zinc no minimum, maximum 0.25%
- Titanium no minimum, maximum 0.15%
- Other elements no more than 0.05% each, 0.15% total
- Remainder Aluminium (95.85%–98.56%)
so, all the non-aluminum stuff in it combined is less than 5%, maybe even less than 1.5%