Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Sure there are a lot of old steel bikes still floating around out there and a certain percentage of bikes sold each year are steel but nonsteel bikes have made up a huge percentage of the market since the early to mid-90s. Over 25 years, the number of nonsteel bikes has grown larger than the number of steel bikes.
People tend to ride new bikes more than old bikes and the part of the market that is dominated steel bikes...the BigBox Store bike...don't get ridden as much when new as higher quality bikes. Since they get ridden more, they tend to wear out, get damaged and break. It happened even during the age of mostly steel bikes. The material in highest use will tend to be the material that has the highest failure rate.
As to your other points, we aren't discussing theft or weight.
Specialized has never been a "cheapo brand". Nor did the frame break the lug. It broke below the lug.
As for the other two breaks, lugs are supposed to be stronger and resist breaking. That lug obviously failed. Even if the lug broke because of corrosion, that points out one of the problems with steel bikes...they are prone to corrosion problems that nonsteel materials don't experience.
The broken seat tube is no more ridable than any broken aluminum or carbon frame with a break in the same area would be. Frankly, I wouldn't ride any of them.
My point, which you missed entirely is that broken frames of any material are just as likely to be unrideable as any other material.
I'm not implying that carbon fiber is safer than other materials. I'm saying that no material is any better at resisting breakage than any other. I'm also saying that the failure modes of carbon and aluminum aren't like those of glass. That old horse is trotted out anytime a new material comes along that isn't steel. In my experience, failure of aluminum frames and parts isn't sudden and catastrophic. It's a long process that is accompanied by a lot of warning.
Steel, on the other hand, is sudden and catastrophic and, more importantly, it fails without warning. It doesn't bend gently. It doesn't creak and groan before it fails. It just shears kind of like people think aluminum breaks.
As for carbon fiber, I haven't experienced a carbon failure yet. I've seen some failures and they all seem to be rather slow events as well. I only have a couple of carbon parts...forks actually...and haven't had any problems with them including a fork that is about 10 years old and has 17,000+ miles on it.
I don't ride carbon. It just hasn't appealed to me. I'm just saying that it doesn't break like you think it does.
We obviously have far different views about frame materials. I am now 73 years old and have seen a lot of failures. The largest amount of these were rider error such as me using egg-beater pedals and spinning so fast down a descent that my foot popped out of the pedals and flew into the front wheel spokes - ouchy. And in the same stretch on a different ride a guy that was always slow decided to race down through a twisting section went off the road an into a barbed wire fence. I still remember trying to lift the barbs off of him in a manner to cause the least amount of damage.
My only steel bike failure was when I was first learning to ride (again of course) and it was a slow ride with a slow group.
But I've had three carbon forks fail. The first was an IRD that was manufacturing error of the first water. The second was a vertical crack in the fork leg that allowed the fork to flex and the wheel to touch the leg and threw me off into a pile of dead leaves that gave me not damage at all. I did ride that one back home VERY carefully. But I should have taken a hint at that because 5 feet further from that pile of dead leaves was a stone culvert. The thirst was occurred when I was descending a road at about 40 mph and hit a bump in the road. Not a pot hole or a grating or anything a bump. I went back later to find it and it looked like perfectly smooth road to me. In any case this did the same thing to Colnago's top of the line Flash fork. A vertical fracture from the left dropout for only about the length of the molded in part of the drop out. This allowed the wheel to twist very slightly causing me to drift off the road into the gravel. I was applying what little brakes I could and using my shoulder against the cliff face to slow. Just as I was about to regain control there was another stone culvert big enough for the bike to fall into. As luck would have it my head was clear of the culvert to the entire force of the collision was absorbed by my body without any further head injuries.
So I am not warning people because I've had bad luck. I know how to crash and since I ride off-road too I crash quite a bit. I'm warning people because almost no one knows how to crash with a surprise failure. And all it takes is one of these to change your life forever.
If it wasn't for my cop friend who wouldn't give up until he found me the proper treatment I would be dead now. And that picture that I posted of the C40 that the head tube had broken off of with no warning was that of that cop who now has his little finger paralyzed. The world is always poorer with one less cyclist. Even some stubborn old argumentative one like me.