spelger

True story: i have no idea what my bike weighs.
Anotehr true story: i really don't care either.

PeteHski

I wasn't talking down to anyone. It was a comment on how much lighter modern bikes have become. Yes my MTB is a blast to ride, but it's a total pig on the road compared to my road bike - which is not particularly lightweight either.

PeteHski

It depends what sort of bike it is supposed to be

livedarklions

You might want to get that looked at.

PeteHski

That's an interesting angle. I would suggest it's because cheap low-end steel tubing weighs the same as it did 40 years ago.

Ironfish653

Not all steel bikes are deRosas, and not all aluminum bikes are KLEINs
​​​​​
Cheap bikes are heavy. Good bikes are light. A cheap aluminum bike will be lighter than a cheap steel bike, but heavier than a good steel bike, or a good aluminum bike.

High quality, lightweight steel tubing is expensive. You can build a good quality aluminum bike that is as light as the expensive steel bike, but costs less. See how that works?

PeteHski

I weigh 75 kg and my bike weighs 8.5 kg, so that's 11.3% of my bodyweight. So by your totally arbitrary 10% figure, I can justify a lighter bike right? A 7.5 kg bike would put me right on the money, which is actually quite reasonable.

Ironfish653

The USA-built Cannondales in my garage would beg to differ.

Aluminum bikes are so common now, that it's easy to forget what a real game-changer the early KLEIN and Cannondales were. They figured out the big-diameter / thin-wall tubes and TIG / heat-treat process to get bikes that were as light as the high-dollar Italian stuff, but at prices more in line with TREK and Specialized.

There's cheap steel, expensive steel, and middle-of-the-road steel. There's cheap aluminum, high-end aluminum, and middle-of-the-road aluminum.
The kinds of high-grade thin-wall steel tubes to make a very light bike are going to be very expensive. Aluminum is roughly 2/3 the weight of steel, strength for strength, so a less-expensive thicker-wall aluminum tube will be the same weight. Or, you can go like KLEIN/Cannondale and make big-diameter, super thin tubes, that are even lighter than the steel tubeset.

That's why you pretty much only find steel bikes at the bottom of the bike market, and in the boutique / specialist builders. For cost and weight, AL pretty much has the middle 2/3 of the market to itself.

wolfchild

I have two MTBs one is steel and the other is aluminum. Both of them have proven to be of equal strength and excellent quality.

woodcraft

Now there's an interesting poll topic...

JayKay3000

I commute, the bike is always heavy, but I seem to stay quite lite and fit so I guess the bike weight doesn't matter for me.

Fastfingaz

See , Now that tells me that you Truly Enjoy your cycling ! ,,,, I feel the way ....

wolfchild

Same here.

rsbob 

If you are really concerned about weight, give yourself an enema before you head out, if you are able to head out after that.

mschwett 

since taking up road cycling earlier this year, I lightened myself by 15 lbs, i lightened my bike by 4 lbs, and my gear (helmet shoes clothes etc) by maybe 4 lbs. 23 lbs represents around 10% of the total load, but combined with getting a bit stronger and better gearing it feels more like 33% easier to ride up a hill. and 50% more fun.

so while I agree that only a pro could “feel” a pound or two here or there, it all adds up and compounds with other factors.

Ironfish653

You've actually made your own case, here; That $200 aluminum MTB weights 30 lbs; it'd weigh closer to 40 lbs in steel

You're arguing from the specific to the general: " There are cheap, heavy aluminum bikes; therefore, all aluminum bikes are cheap and heavy"

See if this makes sense:
Cheap bikes are heavy.
Cheap aluminum bikes are heavy, but not as heavy as cheap steel
Better bikes are typically lighter than cheap bikes.
Very light aluminum bikes are (more) expensive, but not as expensive as very light steel bikes.

Bottom-end bikes will still be bottom-end. Just because Cannondale got the light-weight-big-tube design figured out 40 years ago, doesn't mean that tech is going to trickle down to a $200 bike in the Philippines

PeteHski

I wouldn't waste any time worrying about what other people think about bike weights. Lightweight bikes feel much nicer to ride, especially up hills. Obviously there are diminishing returns, but any Joe can feel the difference between a 30 lb and 20 lb road bike if they actually ride up anything that you would call a hill. But you have already discovered this for yourself.

Cougrrcj 

My intent of providing my bike weights was to show that a low-mid-grade bike (My '75 Fuji S-10S) weighed only 4-5 pounds heavier than a high-end bike of the day - a (Schwinn Paramount on tubulars!

Forward ten years - and the triple-butted CrMo '86 Miyata 710 was still ~23.5 pounds. Still relatively light for it's day. CF and AL were not popular yet. Yes, by then some bikes were getting down to under 20 pounds, but not many... and certainly not popular with casual riders.

OK, now I'll address that 10% bike-to-rider-weight malarkey. Back in '76 when I started getting serious about cycling, my bike was the '75 Fuji at 26.5 pounds. I weighed 135. 10%? There were NO 13.5 pound road bikes back then. The Fuji was closer to 20% of my body weight. More than 20% if one considers as-ridden weight including water bottle, spare tube, toolkit and pump/inflater. Even if you were to use the tubular-equipped Paramount and add the extras, you'd still be getting close to 20%.

In the intervening 45 years, I've packed on over 70 pounds - an additional 50% of my initial weight - actually at one point I was 219 but I'm down to ~203. If I were to really consider weight weenie-ism, I'd lose a greater percentage of weight off myself than I could ever take off the bike (or get a 'more modern' 10-pound lighter bike...