Not on my aluminum bike, mine is a hybrid and I won't ride more than 10 miles on it.

A friend quit riding & stored her aluminum trek hybrid/MTB at my house. Like you I wouldn't ride more than 10 miles but that's because it's too small for me & the saddle is squishy. OTOH even with the fat MTB tires it's far lighter than my Novara Randonee. Recreational/racer/MTB riders get a wide choice of materials but production tourers are more or less stuck with steel. The Trek has a comfier ride than my Rando, probably due to the fat tires. I also sometimes ride another abandoned alu hybrid with 32 or 35mm tires & front suspension. Upright riding position & flat bars which I don't favor but OTOH the front suspension really makes the ride comfy & makes me wonder why so many production tourers have a harsher ride.

Did 125 mile day trip on my old aluminum Giant. I would still be riding it if I didn't want a longer wheel base.

If your ride is too harsh (as it may), a few more mm on the tires or a few less PSI will fix that better than a steel frame. Having said that, I replaced mine with a steel frame.

While Cannondale doesn't make a tourer anymore (My LBS did find one still in stock for a customer.) their first production bike was a tourer, which made sense as they made bags and such for touring and camping. Cannondale was about eight years behind Klein, who innovated the big tube aluminum diamond frame, AFIK.

Except for perhaps some 7XXX series aluminum nothing is as third world readily repairable as steel, if CF touring frames appear they could perhaps work with a fiberglass repair, I don't know. As I've put thousands of miles on aluminum frames over the last two decades, touring on my new to me Cannondale touring bike makes perfectly good sense.

Brad

I would, and do, touring on aluminum. I wouldn't tour on a cross bike. A cross bike is, essentially, a long road race bike made for playing in the mud. The frame isn't beefed up to carry a load so it's more likely to develop death wobbles due to the lighter frame and fitting panniers on it is likely to be problematic if you have anything larger than small to normal feet. You can cantilever the load off the back to get more foot room but moving the load back with a shorter wheelbase and more responsive steering will create other problems. You end up with a tail wagging the dog.

If you are going to go the Bikesdirect route, why not go with the Windsor for just a little more.

Bicycle steel and bicycle aluminum really aren't all that easy to repair in the field no matter where you are. Both require some skill to work on and repair. People have a fantasy that a steel bike can be repaired by the local smithy but that's only true if you happen to be riding a Flying Pigeon. The local smithy or car mechanic is just a likely to burn a hole through a steel frame as fix it.

ahh, just what an old Schwinn Varsity is for

Dear Hey:

I tour on steel. However that is becuase I usually go to rural Eastern Europe and it is much easier to get steel welded than aluminum. I have never had a frame failure that required a weld, but it does ease my mind to know that steel welding equitment is usually available. I also prefer the ride of steel, but like the light weight of aluminum.

John

I guess we've all heard the story about Eugene Christophe having to fix his broken fork during the 1913 Tour de France. I've never been to Eastern Europe but I recall driving thru Mexico & was amazed how many houses had home workshops...lots of people that do cast-iron work for instance. So I guess the chances of getting a steel frame fixed on the road is undoubtedly better than alu or other materials. But I'm wondering if an emergency repair would later need to be fixed to put the frame back to top-notch condition (ie replacing a frame tube)? An LHT frame only costs about $500, seems like after returning home it might be cheaper just to buy a new frame than to pay for expert frame repair. & if the damaged frame was really nice (ie custom) then I guess a repair would be worth the price. I don't have experience with a damaged frame on tour but it seems to me the easiest (if not cheapest) thing to do would be to get a new frame express-shipped.

I dunno, to me it seems like the frame-material-for-touring debate is, er, framed by the rather limited choices for reasonably-priced touring frames. Most touring folk use steel, it offers the widest choice of models & is cheapest, hard to argue with that. OTOH I've wrecked a couple of steel frames in accidents, once the fork & top-tube & down-tube were all bent. Seems like that sort of damage would be unrepairable on tour. The other time the fork was bent on both sides. Hard to imagine that getting fixed either short of installing a new fork.

If I had the $$ I'd get a custom titanium touring frame. Sure, no chance of on-tour repairs. But I'm thinking that the chance of bike theft is 100X the chance of being stuck in the boonies with a busted frame. Even in "civilized" Western Europe & North America theft in some areas is a huge problem, even for cheap bikes let alone fancy tourers with panniers full of goodies.

No. Today's bicycle tubing is very thin and construction methods have changed a lot since 1913. You're not going to repair it with a stick welder, which is all you're likely to find in the middle of nowhere. Repair with a MIG welder might be possible, but you'd have to stumble upon someone who had quite a bit of experience welding thin material.

TIG welding is generally the way to go for repairs. Given the cost of the equipment (my used entry-level AC/DC TIG welder cost US$1500) and the skill/training required to use it properly, my guess is that back-alley workshops are unlikely to have the necessary equipment.

Anecdote : I got some welding repair done by a shop that made stainless AC ducting

In Killarney Eire.

I agree with tmac100, "if there is a catastrophic failure public transpo and replacement bikes/frames are available" Got over 14,000 kilometers light touring around the Philippines on a hybridized MTB aluminum frame. So far so good. When I tour loaded in Southeast Asia next year, I'll use my steel touring bike.

Gilbert

I've seen other posts that make your point--I agree that the old tourer belief that steel can be fixed out in the boonies is a bit of wishful thinking. My point was more that with steel there might be some chance of getting a repair whereas with aluminum or titanium, AFAIK forgetaboutit. Really, there have only been a couple instances, at best, that I've read about tourers getting a steel frame repaired by some back-alley handyman. Even in the heavily populated DC area with a lot of well-heeled cyclists I was surprised to learn that there is no local custom frame-builder now (AFAIK). Now if one's frame breaks in Portland Oregon one is in luck--I think there's a frame builder on every block there ;^)

Plus I'm wondering how even a fairly skilled welder could fix a busted steel frame? Cut out the bent section & TIG-weld some sort of sleeve over the section? At best it sounds dicey.

I rode an aluminum frame Cannondale T1000 around Australia. The bike frame broke near Shark Bay about ~280km from nearest bike store in Geraldton. I rode those 280km with the rear chainstay attached together with duct tape. It held. I didn't try very hard to find someone to weld aluminum and at that time there wasn't a Cannondale frame in my size available when we phoned anywhere in Australia. I flew back to the US to pick up a replacement bike since it wasn't that much more expensive than having the replacement packed and shipped and because I knew I could rely on getting it there.

With that said, and experience I had... I'd still tour on aluminum in some outback regions including outback Australia or other remote areas since likely I'd want something more than a simple weld anyways. I might also try an alternate strategy such as when I cross Russia and had a spare bike stashed with friends elsewhere in the country. Worst came to worst, I could get to the bike with a week of train travel...