Originally Posted by
Atlas Shrugged
So you took us till the mid 90’s, almost 30 years ago. You have not explained how steel overcomes it’s massive strength to weight disadvantage to carbon nor the ability to modify the layup throughout the bike. A 1,500 gram carbon bike will be more durable than any equivalent weight steel bike. A Specialized Aethos S-Works comes in at 585grams try that with any other material. But I did enjoy all the fancy branding for what is essentially heat treated steel. But my favorite was the “Differential Shape Butting”.
Can you repair a carbon bike frame if crashed ? Not as far as I know. But with a steelframe you can. The Reynolds 853 introduced in the mid 90's (1994 to be exact)
is Reynolds’ premium grade of ferrous steel. 853
is an air-hardening steel. The benefits of this are particularly noticeable in the weld area, where, unlike conventional steel alloys, strength can actually increase after cooling in air immediately after welding. 853 is heat-treated to give high strength and damage resistance, and the steel properties allow thin walls to be used so that lower-weight but fatigue-resistant structures can be made. The 853 Pro Team was used by the TVM road racing in gazelle bikes in1998. To get back to the Columbus Genius topic, i
n 1991 Columbus introduced some Differential Butted Shape butted (DBS) tubesets in which the shape of the butt actually follows the area of the tube where most of the stress is. GENIUS was the first of them. The butted ends on GENIUS are shorter, so the whole set was the first one strictly designed for TiG welding. If the genius tubes were this bad they wouldn't have been in production and wouldn't have been used on professional road bike racing bikes and mountain biking professional racing bikes. A wide selection of tube thicknesses and diameters allowed GENIUS tubing to be used in many different types of frame types. Carbon started to be used massively in late 90's early 00's. There is a martensic ageing steel that dwarfs the carbon made frames, it is the Reynolds 953 developped in the 2000's.This alloy that can achieve tensile strength in excess of 2000 MPa, Reynolds achieved a strength-to-weight ratio that can take on the world’s best. The resilient ride of steel, very high impact strength (similar to armour plating) and fatigue resistance combine to provide an extraordinary material. The 953 is of course more focused on custom made frame rather than on an industrial scale because it is a very expensive material and there are specific techniques of how to weld or filet braze it. We might agree to disagree but steel is a material with loads of potential and remember also that before the introduction of more exotic materials such as aluminium, titanium and carbon,Reynolds was considered the dominant maker of high end materials for bicycle frames, with 27 winners of the Tour de France winning the race riding on Reynolds steel tubing (531c,653 and 753). Not bad a record for steel tubing 