We just had a long bitter argument about how unsafe carbon fiber bikes are.

I have since talked to an industry insider and he told me that carbon fiber frames can be make as strong and long lasting as steel frames. But, he said, then these frames would weigh about the same as steel frames. And the demand is for ultra-lights. He thinks that eventually the majority of companies will be sued out of business because the industry knows that these ultra-lights are dangerous to the point of serious injuries or even death. He thinks that it is only a matter of time before we start getting a large number of failures.

In any case, be that as it may, I have a Colnago Dream HP. This has an aluminum main triangle, a carbon fork and the rear triangle is stolen directly from the C50. Ready for the road with a seatpack on it it weights in at 22.4 lbs.

I am in the process of building up a very good steel frame. I transferred all of the parts from my broken C40 to it. Presently the only thing I'm missing is the control cables, bar tape and seatpack. I put it on the scale yesterday and it weighs 22.11 lbs. And it has heavy Campy Atlanta wheels on it.

Now the C40 was two lbs lighter but you have to remember that I had a non-catastrophic failure of a fork that caused me to crash at high speed. And my friend had a catastrophic failure of his C40 for no reason at all luckily while he was on a bike path going about 5 mph. He got away with a severely broken small finger that will never regain full motion. And in 15 more minutes he would have been on a 40 mph descent.

For those that absolutely MUST have ultra-lights you can now buy top of the line titanium frames for half the price of the top of the line carbon frames. There is still the problem of the carbon forks but at that price savings you can replace the fork every two years and feel perfectly safe.

So there really is no reason to take chances with your life on a full carbon bike.

The problem is that people invest a lot of confidence in their own judgement and tend to pay no attention whatsoever to facts and statistics. So I don't expect many if any to pay any attention to this post.