Originally Posted by MudPie
Very interesting, regarding all members being in compression. But why is compression in the frame desireable? Compression could lead to failure by buckling. But I guess tension is likely to rip welds apart.
Example: For a 1" dia, .060 wall, 36 long steel tube in compression, a very conservative calculation gave me a critical buckling load of 1,270 lbf. The same tube in tension can expect to fail at around 6,000 lbf. Those are some pretty heavy duty loads for a bike!
No problem for high quality material and high quality welds.