Originally Posted by
The Golden Boy
A 600 series frame should not have 531 stays and fork. CrMo or Tange Mn alloy.
Not gonna make it a big debate, but I've always thought the info in the Trek catalogs is somewhat ambiguous, and I think they allowed themselves the freedom to use any CrMo or similar which was available and suitable to satisfy the manufacturing process and stop the line as little as possible. We have to admit, 531 and CrMo are pretty similar, though not identical, and many non-Reynolds branded tubings are CrMo. We don't really know what was in the minds of the engineers and managers or what may have been written in engineering documents. We only know the words that were chosen for the consumer's information. Presumably those were written by marketing people. It's a lot more than you get with a lot of bike companies, but it still is not the hard technical requirements.