My understanding was that AerMet is just a nightmare material to try to build a bike frame out of, especially at production scale. This turned out to be true for a lot of the weirdo aerospace materials that the outdoor industry experimented with after the Cold War. 3/2.5 titanium seems to have been as far up the fantastic-material-properties vs painful-to-work-with curve as anyone's been willing to climb. Even that proved to be just a bit too far for even Chinese mass production to do reliably and at scale, at least at a price that any major brand can live with.

I wasn't aware that any AerMet bikes made it to production. (If that's a word that can be applied to any frame that's been silver-fillet-brazed by Mark Nobilette... which it isn't.)

Neat article.

--Shannon