Is steel still good

[guerney]

I assume my chances of a repair, if it were needed, to my titanium bike frame are slim ?

When looking for a titanium frame on ebay last year, I found a couple going cheap with dodgy looking welds over cracked seat tube collars/top part of the frame where the seat tube is inserted, and wondered whether to approach custom titanium frame builders for a quote to repair - I assumed any such repair work would have been too expensive.

 

[chris667]

I assume my chances of a repair, if it were needed, to my titanium bike frame are slim ?

Anything is possible.

I knew someone years ago who had an estay mountain bike, when those were inf fashion. It cracked where they all did around the bottom bracket.

He made a "bangdage" out of fibreglass (the mat, not car filler) which fixed it. Rode it for years afterward!

Light? Yes. Strong? Yes. Neat? No.

 

[chris667]

I assumed any such repair work would have been too expensive.

Doable, but hard and expensive. Oxygen and hydrogen both make it brittle during welding.

It was comercially viable around the end of the cold war - there were lots of aviation factories willing to produce anything. That's the reason there were so many of them in the early nineties.

 

[esuark]

I have hanging in the garage my titanium road bike that has a crack in the seat tube 4"/100mm up from the bottom bracket. I did many miles with it here and on the continent, colleagues were always telling me it made a ticking noise but being hard of hearing I never heard it. Telling them when what ever it is wears out and falls off I`ll know. However when I once cleaned it I noticed the crack and I think it was there from almost the beginning. Needles to say since I noticed it and being much older I no longer use it. I did toy with the idea of sliding a bit of seat tube down to that area as a bodge fix.

 

[Bonzo Banana]

In marketing terms no one cares about high tensile steel its just seen as a the cheapest material I guess but in fact on cheap bikes high tensile steel can be very different. This is from memory so I might have got a few numbers wrong but high tensile steel can be 1010, 1020, 1040, 1060 and I'm sure many others. I think fuji-ta work with maybe 1040 and 1060 but older Ralieghs for example might be 1020. There is a huge strength to weight ratio difference between some of these steels in fact the best are about the same as entry level chromoly steel but also some are easier to weld with standard welding equipment where as others need more specific equipment so less realistic for home repairs. So some cheap steel bikes aren't as easy to do strong welding repairs. At the bottom end of the market even high tensile steel has had further cost reductions as it used to be even the cheapest bikes would have forks with tapered blades that would curve to give a nice suspension effect but nowadays many of the cheapest bikes simply have straight blade steel forks that lack that suspension effect these of course are slightly cheaper to produce with less manufacturing stages. Not such an issue if you have thick tyres though. The bike below is your typical entry level high tensile steel bike today but to be honest apart from the straight blade forks pretty much the same bike has been sold for at least 20 years and earlier to that maybe it would have been cantilever brakes rather than 'V'. V brakes are the newest innovation on that bike and those are from the last century. It doesn't make it a bad bike though for general use plus maybe straight blade steel forks are a little stronger so better for a front hub motor conversion.

 

[chris667]

So some cheap steel bikes aren't as easy to do strong welding repairs.

There's no point! There are millions of them, available for less than the price of a repair.

None of us would ever need to buy a new bike ever again.

 

[saneagle]

There's no point! There are millions of them, available for less than the price of a repair.

None of us would ever need to buy a new bike ever again.

Good point, well presented. This is what often causes the demise of cheap bikes. It's cheaper to buy one than to pay a bike shop to repair a worn BB.

A close friend had a cheap catalogue bike that needed attention to the brakes and chain. She took it to Halfords, who quoted about £150 to fix it. I fixed it for nothing with a few spare parts I had lying around, so the bike is now good for another few years of service instead of ending up in a skip. It's a shame that most people haven't a clue when it comes to servicing or fixing bikes.

 

[Ocsid]

It's a shame that most people haven't a clue when it comes to servicing or fixing bikes.

Sadly that reads in the UK for just about anything, long gone is the era "we" mended, or even took and interest in the repair of most things, that generation is passing; clearly a generalisation, but IMO reflects how I see things.
Even my children who grew up in a house where I attempted to fix whatever was "broke", are themselves disinterested in doing so.
Odd, in that the state of the planet, global warming, seem to be issues they are genuinely very concerned about, though there is here a strong link with the wasting of so much that could be repaired.

 

[chris667]

long gone is the era "we" mended, or even took and interest in the repair of most things, that generation is passing

I think that very often this sounds like a putdown of young people. It's the kind of thing someone who grumbles about them buying expensive coffee or avocado on toast or whatever, as if not buying them would mean any of them could afford to buy a house or retire at a decent age.

Let's not forget that we live in an age of items that aren't designed to be repaired - people aren't happy about that but it's where we are.

I had a conversation with someone in their thirties a couple of months ago. An old Beetle drove past and it was obviously running very rich. I said it was always the problem with cars that had automatic choke. This led to me explaining how a carburettor worked. No-one who learns how to drive knows how to operate the choke on a car anymore, because there hasn't been a car with a choke produced for the best part of 30 years. Nowadays, cars are sealed units. If your car develops a fault, you take it to a garage with a technician (not really a mechanic) who plugs a proprietary fault reader into it to diagnose the fault.

You can't blame people for not learning how to fix things that need specialist, proprietary equipment to be able to fix them. It's not a good use of their time.

And frankly, 20 year old me who seemed to spend most weekends trying to fix something on his car to get to work the next morning would have been delighted to have bought an old car that just worked, like even old cars do now. Our current car has a service interval of 25,000 miles! Unbelievable - it's ten years old now. Ten year old cars when I learned to drive were absolutely dreadful.

 

[Az.]