No. This whole scandium thing is still confusing people

Go to Easton's website for a very good beginner's level explanation of what scandium is used for. Scandium is not used pure for any bike parts. It is an alloying ingredient in aluminium alloys. I repeat: scandium is an alloying ingredient in aluminium alloys, nothing more.

For those of you who don't weant to, Scandium is added to aluminium alloys for one reason and one reason alone. It does not make the tube appreciably stronger. It does not make the tube appreciably tougher. It does to weldments what has never been done in aluminium alloys before - it maintains a fine grain in the HAZ, a phenomenon that used to be restricted to steels only. Scandium vastly ******* the rate of grain growth in areas above the recystallization temperature of aluminium alloys. That is all it does, as far as you will be concerned.

What this means to the layman? The weld isn't brittle any more, and the solution treatment of the weld zone doesn't cause a massive, coarse precipitation there, while a fine one everywhere else. It means the metal in the weld is as strong as the metal in the tube, give or take work-hardening effects. This is an entirely new thing or aluminium alloys.


Carbon fibres at the scale you see in bike frames are approximately as strong as 853 (as supplied, not in the weld-zone) in tension. Their impact toughness in plain strain (what you commonly see in a Charpy impact test and what you will probably see most in failures) is about one fiftieth of that of an equal sized volume of stuctural, high-strength steel. Steel of the three is the toughest. Aluminium second, at about one third to one quarter that of steel.