10 Reasons To Consider Aluminium Over Carbon For Your Next Bike

aluminium bikes are brilliant and in this video i'm going to tell you all the reasons why if you're on the fence as to whether you should get an aluminium or carbon frame for your next bike well this is the video for you right before we go any further i need to address a quick elephant in the room as i'm aware that some of you will already be squirreling away in the comment section below saying that it's aluminum and not aluminium well as a chemist i can confirm that it is aluminium as the suffix iron means of the earth and that's what the danish chemist that discovered it named it i mean do you call magnesium and sodium magnesium and sodium didn't think so and in 1990 the international union of pure and applied chemistry decreed that the internationally recognized name for that element is aluminium so well if you want to call it aluminum well you can that's one of the freedoms afforded to you but just be aware that the international scientific community won't take you seriously however we live in a free world a democracy so the interest of fairness we can have a poll if you like if you disagree with me you can vote down below by clicking and taking through to the gcn app is it aluminum or is it aluminium vote now on to the first advantage of aluminium it is cheaper now i know before you accuse me of being captain obvious and all the rest of it it's not obvious to everyone but it does mean that you can get almost all of the performance of a top-end carbon frame but for much less cash and yes the world's greatest carbon frames available to humanity are better than the best top-end aluminium frames they're lighter they're stiffer they're more aerodynamic but they can cost as much as a car plus top-end aluminium frames are often as good and in some cases better than entry-level carbon ones and if you compare a top-end aluminium frame to a top-end carbon frame you're kind of realistically looking at sort of 90 of the performance for sometimes like 20 of the price which is huge and with that money saved well you can spend it on whatever you like personally and probably go for some nice fancy wheels and perhaps a bit better group set next reason is that well i mentioned it briefly before but top end aluminium frames can be better than entry-level carbon people love carbon everything it's an easy sell because it's associated with loads of cool stuff like well tour de france winning bikes formula one fighter jets space i mean they're all really cool things and when combined together in people's imagination they can make an entry-level carbon fiber bike feel like it's the the cat's pajamas but not all carbon fiber is equal the carbon fiber in an entry-level bike is drastically different to that used in a top-of-the-range fancy pants tour de france winning steed it's what you do with it that counts at least well that's what i read on the internet cheap carbon fibre will typically have a higher wall thickness on the tubes lower quality resins employed within it less strength to weight ratio less compliance and even to non-sprinters like myself it feels noticeably less stiff in terms of ride quality when you ride it next is durability now carbon has a much higher tensile strength than aluminium typically in the region of 3.8 times higher but aluminium is much more resistant to impact when carbon suffers impacts it's more brittle and can often crack aluminium is much less likely to do this and typically dense that is of course unless you're riding in cryogenic temperatures or on the russian front this durability means that if you have an aluminium frame it's much more likely to dent and get scratched and pick up battle scars along the way but crucially still be rideable now well the scuttles are cool anyway but if you're someone who likes the idea of riding lots of you know small circuit criteriums then an aluminium frame can be a good way to go events where there is potentially quite a bit of crashing it's for this reason that we often see most the riders and events like the red hook crit using aluminium frames next up is precision of the engineering with an aluminium frame it's much easier to achieve higher levels of precision engineering at a lower cost this is because for example with the bottom bracket you can have a single piece of aluminium which is then machined from both sides to create perfect alignment you can even have the threads put straight in to the bottom bracket section and therefore have a perfectly aligned bottom bracket where the bearings match up perfectly and the chainset will spin beautifully and freely to achieve this level of precision in carbon is much more time consuming and more challenging there is a caveat to this though and that is that it does depend on the type of bottom bracket standard that's applied to your aluminium frame and not all bottom bracket standards are equal personally i'm a big fan of threaded ones and threading into aluminium should in theory be much more easier to do than carbon next is the environmental impact because aluminium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust but extracting aluminium from its ore bauxite or aluminium oxides is an incredibly energy expensive process approximately three percent of the world's entire electricity usage is used to extract aluminium from its oil which is absolutely loads and well the benefit is though that aluminium is recyclable and carbon fiber frames well they're not recycling aluminium saves 95 of the energy that you ordinarily use to extract it from its raw material it also saves 97 of the greenhouse gas emissions that are normally used in its production and for every one tonne of aluminium we recycle it saves nine tons of carbon dioxide emissions which is why it's absolutely massive it also saves four tons of the raw bauxite ore that is used to extract it basically if you want to save the polar bears get an aluminium bike [Music] but wait what about weight well yeah aluminium frames are heavier but not by much and weight is seriously overrated i mean typically as a kind of rule of thumb aluminium frames are going to be around 200 to 300 grams heavier than the equivalent carbon one but often with an aluminium frame you get a carbon fork and a carbon seat post these days too if we put this into context and take that 300 gram difference between an aluminium bike and an equivalent carbon bike with the same components on then that difference in weight is going to be negligible on the flat and it's going to make very very little difference on the climbs and to explain why here's an example using some maths if we take a 75 kilogram rider and a 7.5 kilogram bike and put them on a 10 kilometer alpine climb with 600 meters of elevation gain then to complete that climb in 33 minutes will require the rider to ride at 304 watts if we then add 300 grams of additional system mass for that rider to then complete the same climb in the same time they will have to produce more power but only 1 to 1.5 watts more power which really isn't much at all basically weight is overrated and it's way less important than raw watts if you don't believe me well i weigh 68 kilograms philippo gana weighs 85 kilograms and well i mean if we had a race i think we know how it would go down [Music] better components i mean if you're looking at two bikes side by side in a bike shop they're the same price one's aluminium frame one's carbon frame then you should expect that the aluminium frame should have higher quality components sometimes one maybe even two times a level higher than the carbon one so typically something such as shimano ultegra on the aluminium one maybe some high spec wheels versus shimano 105 or maybe even shimano tiagra on the carbon one and although you've got that kind of 300 gram weight difference between the frames you're already starting to offset that with lighter better quality components but you said weight doesn't matter sharp weight does matter a bit and it is important to some people [Music] but what about stiffness and comfort aluminium gets a bad rep a lot of people complain that it results in a harsher less comfortable ride than carbon fiber and on top of this they say that it's not as stiff and it's heavier well while this can be true aluminium's bad rep is kind of a bit of a myth it's largely down to the fact that a lot of low end bikes are made from aluminium but much like carbon the technology has moved on significantly and this is for good reason aluminium is the world's most common material for making bikes most of the world's bikes are made from aluminium moving away from just simply having you know round cylindrical tubes engineers have got much better at shaping and forming aluminium into cross sections and shapes which have much better comfort and stiffness in a bike frame and on top of that material scientists have improved aluminium alloys so that they can optimize the material properties of these alloys to make them optimal for a bike frame manufacturing processes such as hydroforming and butting mean that you can now have tube shapes that vary with respect to their shape along their length and also the wall thickness and this means that you can have more efficient use of the material giving a superior strength to weight of the final frame despite these advancements carbon can still be created and laid up in a way that offers greater compliance but not by much and in our experience the thing that makes the biggest difference to comfort on a road bike is tire volume and tire pressure so when looking for your next bike one of the things we'd advise is go for one that's got plenty of tire clearance so that you can fit bigger tires if that's important to you [Music] and next is bike packing now you want to go bike packing of course you do all the cool kids are going bike packing and admittedly some of the less cool kids but anyway if you do go bike packing on your fancy new carbon bike one of the things that people unfortunately find is that if you're riding in dirty wet conditions once a bit of dirt and moisture gets in between your frame and your bike packing bag straps it can kind of rub away at your frame on a really long bike packing adventure and this can then sometimes run rub through the paint and in some cases even through into the carbon if this happens on your aluminium frame and it gets a bit scratched well it's not the end of the world it's not likely to significantly impact the structural integrity of the frame and if it gets scratches on well i kind of think it looks cool it's easier to repair and well it cost you less in the first place so hang on a minute you're telling me that aluminium is better than carbon well in some ways yes yes it is but of course if you're looking at the absolute pinnacle of bike engineering carbon is the superior material but if you're on a smaller budget or you perhaps feel that you don't need a slightly lighter slightly stiffer slightly more aero bike then aluminium is well worth considering plus i know from experience it is possible to build a rim brake top spec aluminium bike that is lighter than some of the disc brake carbon bikes that the pros are using in the tour de france at the moment so there's some food for thought now i hope you've enjoyed this video and found it informative and if you have and you'd like to continue supporting what we do well you know the drill please give us a like and subscribe and i'll see you in the next one i'm uh i'm off now tara

Channel: GCN Tech

Views: 700,509

Keywords: frame, carbon, price, cheap, value, aluminum, aluminium, alloy, alu, material, metal, fibre, fiber, weight, decide, between, expensive, light, lightweight, aero, aerodynamic, stiffer, stiff, stiffness, crash, durable, race, crit, comfort, bikepacking, bike packing, dent, dented, damage, buy, buying, better, best, GCN Tech, GCNTech, Bike Tech, Cycling Tech, Road Bicycle, Retro Tech, Retro Bike, GCN Cycling, ஔ, 4387, Ѩ, sca15, ិ, gc11shs, ꗧ, ଐ, r1, Ղ, n1, ホ, ፕ20, ଙ, ସ, ሙ

Id: e4oUAH4UWVQ

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021