Hi from Arizona. I just bought a Fuji Pro Track road bike. I was told that it was aluminum, but I think it is alloy. It has a long serial number. How do I find out more about this bike?

Thread moved from Introductions to General Cycling Discussion.

Aluminum or alloy is essentially the same thing. People have wrongly (me too) been calling aluminum alloy bikes aluminum forever. I mean technically even alloys are considered aluminum.

Pretty sure they have never made a pure aluminum bike frame, so technically all frames will be some sort of Aluminum alloy like 6061 or something.

Put a magnet on it.

Are the main tubes aerodynamically shaped? Likely an aluminum alloy. The fork is carbon fiber with an aluminum steerer tube?

What do you need to know about the bike that you cannot observe first hand?

Even steel is an alloy, and except for some early "commercially pure" titanium bike frames from the 1970s, even titanium frames will be an alloy of some sort.

You can distinguish steel frames from aluminum or titanium alloy frames with a magnet. Beyond that, it gets trickier. Photos may help.

Would you mind saying what you paid? Prices are of interest to many of us in today's market conditions, both as buyers and as sellers.

If my web searching results are any indication, you have purchased a decent enough bike. Originally equipped, it had external bottom bracket bearings and decent wheels. The obvious downside is the proprietary/odd seatpost and seat clamp arrangement. It that fails in any way, then... ugh.

Can't say I've ever heard anyone refer to a steel bike as an alloy bike. And 99.99999% of the time in the bicycle industry "alloy" means aluminum.

A fuji pro is hydroformed aluminum alloy.

The fuji feather is steel.

Is this your bike?
https://archive.fujibikes.com/2018/Fuji/track-pro-usa5

True, we do not use “alloy” as shorthand for either steel alloy or titanium alloy as we do for aluminum alloy despite the fact that all are alloys, i.e. blends of diverse metallic compounds.

I think the aluminum issue has been cleared up, and so I want to make clear that this is not a road bike, but rather a track bike. It is fixed gear, meaning it has one gear and does not freewheel (aka coasting) so the pedals always turn when the rear wheel does, and in the same direction.

It also has no brakes, because it is intended for use on a velodrome (aka, a track).

Geometry is short and steep, meaning it is responsive and puts the rider in an aggressive position on top of the pedals and forward on the bike. The head tube is also comparatively short, being designed for aerodynamically optimized rider positioning.

Fuji is a common brand, primarily mid-grade, and made in China as most common bikes are.

Track bikes are not good road bikes, but do enjoy popularity particularly with an urban, trick riding crowd. If that’s your plan, you may want to visit the FGSS forum here, otherwise these kinds of bikes are only really used for velodrome track racing, which we also have a forum for if that’s more what you’d like to do.

Yet that's what it is. Many different steel alloys have been used in bicycle frames, including Chromium-Molybdenum, Manganese-Molybdenum, high carbon, stainless, and others.

Welcome! You could post the serial number here and someone will probably be able to decode it for you.