What's in a frame?
 

Hi everyone,
Me and my eternal bike looking and shopping.

Just wondering what is really in a frame and what makes some frames more expensive than others. Of course there is frame material, but we'll take that out of the equation.

It seems that there are some frames out there that go for a premium price while other seem quite cheap. It seems to be roughly organised into three categories
1 - Boutique brands, are the frames actually better?
2 - Standard brands, run of the mill kind of thing. Trek I suppose.
3 - Brands not well known for making quality bikes. Apollo perhaps.
4 - Those available mostly over the internet.

But my question is what are you actually paying for when buying a more expensive one?
Is there a difference in ride quality or other factors?
Will the cheaper ones explode?

I think stiffness of a frame is in this equation as well. The flexier a frame, the cheaper, or so I can imagine.

There is a differenece. I can't prove it.

You can't just take material out of the equation.

Plus there are other costs such as research and development; marketing; sponsorship; customer service, back up and of course there's magical pixie dust

You add all of those factors come up with a price, ignore it and then charge as much as people are willing to pay

You're paying for name, marketing, r&d, design, customer service/warranty...

A great frame, the best frames...like a Look or Pinarello or whatever...they magically do everything right: light, stiff, comfortable, handles like it's on rails, climbs well, descends well, and looks good doing it all. I've gone through a Trek 2.1 Pilot, Specialized Roubaix Expert, Blue CX6.5, BH Connect, Cervelo P2C and a Look 595. And I've test ridden bikes by Trek, Bianchi, Pinarello, Colnago, De Rosa, a generic carbon frame, and I'm sure a few others.

Every bike felt very unique...and strengths and weaknesses. Among the bikes I own, I could probably tell you what frame I was riding while blindfolded (kids, don't ride blindfolded). The Look frame was like $4K...the entire bike build was somewhere around $8K. Is this bike better than my other bikes? Absolutely. It combines the best qualities of all my bikes into one bike. Is it worth the ridiculous price, relative to my other bikes? Absolutely not. At 2-3 times the cost, I'm not 2-3 times faster...it's not 2-3 times lighter. It's the whole 'law' of diminishing returns thing going on. It's nice if you can afford it.

As far as carbon frames...I have to say...I recently took a short ride on a generic carbon frame that someone locally got off of eBay. The whole build was like $1200...105 group, cheap wheels. It was a surprising good ride! Not overly light...but pretty stiff, comfortable, handled well...really solid. Maybe some people would disagree...but it seems like it's hard to buy a truly bad bike these days. Unless the fit is just totally off, just about anything you get will be good to good-enough.

A frame is geometry, period. Different geometry makes a bike handle different. A $10k bike and a $1500 bike with exactly the same geometry will handle exactly the same. People say different materials make the ride "feel" different but I don't buy that. I can't tell any difference between a stee frame and an aluminum frame (which is supposed to be very stiff). The biggest factor in bike "feel" are the tires, wide v skinny tires and tire pressure, soft v very hard.

If were to speak in terms of WR's Madone, I can tell you what's not in the frame

"A $10k bike and a $1500 bike with exactly the same geometry will handle exactly the same. "


Complete bs. I have a cheap steel frame and an expensive carbon frame with the exact same geometry (and the same Conti GP 4000 tires) and they ride completely different.

100% pure bs. there are locals that have multiple custom bikes...all with exactly the same or near exactly the same geometry. carbon, ti, steel...they could tell the difference. and at least between the carbon and ti, so could i. also...my aluminum cyclocross bike with wide 'cross tires...feels MUCH less comfortable than any of my carbon bikes with 21 or 23 width tires pumped upto ill-advised psi levels...and that cross bike's geometry is almost exactly the same as one of my carbon bikes.

that's not to discount how everything else contributes to the ride of the bike...geometry, material, tires, rubes, wheels, seat, bar, bartape, ect...they all contribute to how the bike feels. but to discount the differences in material as a factor in the ride quality of the bike is probably not accurate.

This really is not true. There are significant ride differences between frames. As said above, it's not just material either. It's the engineering of the frame's dynamics.

That said, it's an essentially un-testable premise, as no two frames will have identical geometries.

Two things not in the frame: BB shell, and a warranty

It is definitely a sum of the parts kind of thing. The frame is the base that the parts lay on. Fit is very important. A great frame that doesn't fit is a bad frame. Material is important for ride quality. Back a few years I liked steel frames as opposed to aluminum because I felt they were less punishing on a longer ride. Other guys like the power transfer they felt with aluminum. Titanium has a lot of great qualities but it's expensive. Many would argue it's a great investment and probably so. Carbon fiber early on had delamination concerns and it was expensive but in recent years has become more affordable and generally reliable. Mixes of materials can work pretty well and deliver nice ride qualities.

My advice is to work with somebody that knows bikes and you trust, a good LBS or an experienced cyclist that knows what you want out of a bike. Get a decent quality frame that fits and has the geometry for your kind of riding. If you need to compromise because of budget skimp on components that can be replaced and upgraded as you wear them out or can afford to replace them. Off the rack bikes are like off the rack clothes. Some people can fit them perfectly and other folks need a degree of tailoring. Having someone look with a critical eye at your fit and understanding your "style" is valuable when you're starting.

Some questions for you.

Are you in Oz or Austin, TX?

What do you want to do with your bike? Race crits or ride long distance? Style around town or tour carrying your necessaries? Triathalons maybe or group rides?

How much do you want to spend to get a really nice bike for your use?

There are lots of things that go into the price of the frame. Most of the differences come from R&D and marketing and of course the "what people will pay" thing. Each person in the chain also needs to get a reasonable profit, so this can drive the cost up as well.

I agree that you can get lower priced frames that ride just like the expensive ones. The devil is in the details as they say. This is what we based our business on on.

I agree with you on the geometry but totaly disagree on the feel of the bike. My Trek XO1 was brutal to race cross on. I got a steal Lemond two years ago and I can feel the frame flex and absorb some of the hits, a world of difference. I can feel my vintage Guerciotti flex too while my other AL and Ti bikes feel differently. I love flexy frames.

i completely agree. and to prove this i'll site an example. i used to ride a CF raleigh frame which for all intents and purposes was a decent ride. i happened upon a new frame (ti, the one in my signature) transferred over every part except for the stem and the ride quality was vastly different. I won't go into specifics as to how it was different, but all other things being equal, swapping out the frame showed a noticeable difference. (for what it's worth, i prefer the ride of the ti bike over the ride of the CF bike). geometry wasn't far off either, 55.5 TT, 55 ST, and the head and seat angles were comparable.

In a frame...

Financing. All manufacturing costs a lot of money to set up. Either you finance or pay someone else to do it (and they finance themselves or pay someone... you know the deal).

Materials. Carbon fiber is expensive. In many ways it's more expensive to work with (curing ovens, clean rooms, etc). Go out and research how much it would cost to buy some carbon fiber epoxy and cloth, and look into the various safety issues with working with the same. I abandoned a pet project after I realized it would cost $1000+ just to get started on what would really be a $100 item.

Time/Transport. It takes a while to get things from, say, the Far East to the US. Through customs. And time costs money when you're financing a lot of equipment. If you are financing a few million dollars in materials, equipment, and space, there's a cost per day or month that someone has to pay for.

R&D. Make a frame, ride it around, see what works, what doesn't, and try again. I'm lucky enough to have lived near Cannondale's headquarters for a long time. I got to test ride some weird stuff (elastic rear suspension road bike frame, and this was a serious ride looking for serious feedback) as well as see some interesting things a year or two before they appear in a catalog (like the newest iteration of the SuperSix). R&D takes time and labor. Both cost money.

Marketing. Logos, ads, etc cost money. Deciding who to sell to, what to make. It's why I bought a custom frame recently, instead of trying to fit a production frame - my body proportions are at the extreme of the bell curve and it doesn't make fiscal sense for a manufacturer to sell a frame that fits me well.

Sponsorship. You've probably seen the Velonews articles on how much gear the Slipstream/Garmin/Transitions/whatever team gets. That's all free, plus the manufacturers could be paying cash on top of that. The consumers pay for it all.

Copycat manufacturers. Even copy cat manufacturers have minimum production costs. They may not have the same cachet as the big names (Vuelta vs Zipp) but they still have to buy carbon fiber or pay shipping or whatever. And usually they have to buy whatever they're copying.

There's more but I have to help unload a truck.

cdr

Not identical? How do you figure? (I don't consider tubing diameter and wall thickness in the category of "geometry"... Geometry refers to where the frame locates the rear wheel, pedals, head tube and seatpost.)

Well, you can grab a collection of frames and see if some pair measures up to the same geometry, but there are going to be variances in all the measurements (lengths and angles), due to anything from manufacturing tolerances to different thermal expansion properties. Then you look at how different builders focus on different styles (like longer top tubes for a given frame size) and the combinatorics start to get in the way of finding an exact match (or even +/-0.5mm).

What I'm getting at is that we can't get hung up on the feel differences between two frames being just due to geometry. Even if two frames have identical geometry on paper, it's unlikely that they do as measured.

Holy crappage, lose the crack, it's killing you! If that were true, why wouldn't all the bikes just copy the optimal geometry and use the cheapest materials?

Talk to a machanical or materials engineer and you'll get a far better understanding.

You are basically saying that perfection is impossible in this "vale of tears" (whatever that means). Of course it's correct on a pedantic level that no two manufactured things are strictly identical? But do you really think you're sensitive enough - or that the builders are sloppy enough - that you can tell ride quality differences from a 0.010" difference in top tube length? Or the difference in geometry due to thermal expansion?!!

I suppose a machanical engineer specializes in supersonic aviation (lol).

Anyway, not all mechanical engineers disagree with "Sam Rensho" -- his premise (that the compliance of the non-frame parts overwhelms the compliance of the frame) is sound from an engineering perspective, as far as it goes. The frame material true believers either base their beliefs on subjective experience (can you say "placebo"?) or on more complicated engineering concepts.

My point is that I couldn't feel it if two frames were 5mm off geometry as long as my position was maintained. What I'm saying is that when someone says "my carbon bike handles better than my steel bike," we shouldn't disqualify that statement on the basis of slightly varying geometry.

It's frame engineering and materials combined (as pointed out by everyone else above).

Because there is no optimal geometry. Different applications, crit, road, tt have geometries that are different.

What is in a frame? Last time I looked mine had air in it.

You can see air! :twitchy:

There is one factory in Asia. All frames are made in Asia. All frames coming out of the same factory made out of the same material are identical. Therefore, all frames of the same material are identical. Thus spake BF.