Not saying AL is better than Carbon, nothing is indestructible.
Found while surfing TCR Advanced.

Example of Carbon:

x mart aluminium (and I don't watch top gear) is the best as they use so much of it in their frames that they are nearly solid.

We've been riding aluminium bikes long enough to know that as a frame material for bicycles, it is fine and one should consider that most of the parts attached to that frame are also made with aluminium.

I have seen more cracked and broken frames than most of the people here combined and most often it stems from impact damage or poor manufacturing processes.

Heh - which Bicycle Sport Shop did that to you? Most of them that I've been to have good people working there. I'm in the one on Parmer all the time.

Actually a good aluminum frame is the Specialized Allez E5 frame. The shop on Parmer had some good deals on them recently. I even thought about picking one up.

One thing to watch for with aluminum is if the frame was annealed properly. Most are - every once in a while some of the cheaper brands don't do it though.

My son has an '81 PK Ripper (looptail) that is still intact after decades of bashing.

I ride an '89 Raleigh Technium PRE that is still in perfect condition. Just want to add that harshness of ride does not depend on the bike's engineering or lack of. It depends on the rider's butt and arms.

Stress failures? Sounds like some get more stressed over the aluminum than what the aluminum itself does.

Don't listen to tattooed hammerheads! Enjoy your bike.

I would never buy another Aluminum frame: the welded ones are ALL crookied as the Aluminum warps, although there are a few that are close; if you bend it loses 1/2 it's strength, it transmits a lot of shock and vibration so it will "beat you up" on a long ride, ( some the newer frames with shaped tubes and carbon stays are supposed to better)

I would consider an Alu frame mtn bike with shocks of there were no other affordable alternative.

Foolishness......

God hates to be misquoted.

I'm jealous of your son!!!
I have the Kuwahara/ET bike with Tuff wheels & all, nice bike, but I always wanted a PK Ripper as a kid.
It's a tank, & it still rides the way it did in the 80's.

LMFAO!!!

Looks great and I wouldn't be surprised if you ride it for another 20. If you bought that new and kept it all these years, I would guess you are in the top 1% of bike owners when it comes to how long you keep a bike.

In conclusion,
Yes, AL can have slightly more of a fatigue problem than steel or TI.
No, you shouldnt worry about it.

You oughta know Sixty...You once sat on his right-hand side!

I have four road and cross bikes in my stable. One carbon, one aluminum/carbon, one aluminum, and one steel. All of them ride smoothly.

I have one bike that's on its way to Craigs list -- a way too-stiff aluminum bike that I replaced with the steel bike.

The material that a frame is made from is not the sole determinant of how it rides. You simply can't generalize fragility/durability/stiffness/noodliness/plushness/harshness/etc.ness based solely on material.

Au contraire, mon freire. You get a stress riser (i.e. a crack), whether by trauma or fatigue, and that crack grows until it is a break. Breaking by bending or snapping is VERY rare.


No, it's not unreasonable. The OP is asking about aluminum frames cracking, and the vast majority of cracks come from fatigue failure. Impact (for example, if you're riding a frame that gets a lot of abuse, like a mountain bike) can definitely accelerate the process, or finish off a weakened spot, but you basically never get an abrupt failure that isn't from fatigue except in the case of a major crash.

Baloney. You have no way of knowing that this is true. Crack a few aluminum frames before you start talking about how much worse you would have been hurt by it. Check out CDR's explanation upthread. Break a chainstay or seattube and you're probably going to be okay, no matter what you're riding. Break a top tube, you've got a scary situation. Break a downtube or headtube, and you're in for a world of hurt, no matter what you're riding. Frames broken in a particular place all behave in the same way, no matter what they're made from.

Actually, I do - experience, a rudimentary understanding of how the universe functions, and sheer common sense. Impact accelerates the process, but it's extremely difficult to take a brand-new frame and break it by smacking it into something in the course of normal riding. With accumulated wear and tear, all those sweet jumps will eventually do the job, but again, that's because of the continual process of pushing the material too far, weakening it and eventually starting micro-cracks that propagate into full-blown cracks.

EDIT: Actually, let me back off on this - I still think this is basically true, but I want to clarify that, yes, the distinction between impact damage and fatigue in the kind of case I'm describing can seem a bit academic. When I say that the culprit for most frame failures is fatigue, what I'm saying is that a single impact that snaps something on a frame is rare. It's a lot more common that all those rough landings start to add up and start a crack that ultimately leads to a crack. And Sixty Fiver is right on, of course, to say that most failures stem from manufacturing defects (and impacts, but I'm not sure we mean the same thing by that, and I beg to differ on single impacts doing in a frame without defects). Most frames, no matter what they're made of, will never break. I stand by my statement that any claim that you'll be hurt worse by a breaking aluminum or carbon frame than a breaking steel frame is complete and utter baloney.

aluminum - you forgot it causes alzheimers
since you forgot - maybe you have it already!!

wle

To make it worse, it was given to him back in '98 by a neighbor who dug it out of a local bike junkyard and restored it. He raced it down the street at the Waterford Oaks BMX track in southern Michigan. I was his wrench. Great family fun.

My first experience with carbon is not too swift. The Trek 1500 came with a Bontrager carbon seat post. I picked up my bike at 9pm at the LBS fresh from getting a new chain and tune up. I go to raise the seat post and the clamp took four full turns to loosen enough to move it. There was a 4 inch crack down the back of that post. But I guess I could be opening a can of carbon worms if we get into the goods and bad's of carbon v.s. metal seat posts...

The point is that breaking isn't the only mode of failure. Well, it is in aluminum, but that's the point: steel bends. Aluminum just fails catastrophically.

Again, this is an an unsupportable assertion. Everything that follows is, therefor, nonsense.

Try riding an aluminum frame and/or fork into something hard enough to cause it to fail. Try the same thing with steel. Steel will bend long before it snaps. Aluminum just snaps. On the two occasions I mentioned, that phenomenon made a big difference to my face.

I bolded the key bits again. I'm not going to get into an argument about the definition of "extremely difficult", but I've done it twice and I'd be willing to bet that someone, somewhere, is doing the same thing right now.

If only I were you neighbor...
Man, your son scored huge with that PK Ripper!!!

PK Ripper, Kuwahara... Wow, memories...

Some other names of dirt bikes that I drooled over back in the day:
GT
Mongoose
Redline
Schwinn Predator

Those were the days. I had a Predator but wanted a Sting.

I'm not a fan of carbon seat post - haven't found one stiff enough for me. Stems and seat posts are one area where carbon takes a back seat to aluminum still IMO.

Back when biking in general was much less OCD. I still ride old bikes and do so with great passion and joy....and keep up with the 3,000.00 biked guys.

You smash your bike into a curb or car, I don't care what it is made of, it will be destroyed. Without details of the bike and what happened..doesn't mean much.

I hope that was the result of a monster pothole or something. Otherwise, I do NOT want a pair of Boyd wheels!!!!

That picture says nothing about boyd wheels or CF or anything else. That bike had an impact such that that fork and wheels both failed simultaneously. That was not a "I was just riding along" scenario. That looks more like someone ran into a brick wall at 20mph.