Carbon Vs Aluminium Vs Titanium Vs Steel: Which Bike Frame Material Is Best?

in life there are often multiple ways to get to the same goal different paths that lead to the same destination or variations on a recipe that give you the same dish now often those choices are simple like a comfortable armchair over a wooden bench or a cup of coffee over a cup of bothering but sometimes those choices are bewildering they leave us floundering unsure which way to turn next what if you're presented with four different armchairs just with slightly different fabric or four cups of coffee just with a slightly different roast not so easy then is it and that is what we're faced with today really i thought we were here to ride bikes i've just lugged all four of these into the middle of nowhere yeah don't worry alex we are what we have here are four bikes that represent a choice that many of us face which frame material should you choose now we've got four bikes here from the same manufacturer ribble based on their same do-it-all platform the cgr the principal difference between them is in the frame material we've got titanium we've got aluminium we've got steel and we've got carbon what are their relative attributes and strengths is one better than another [Music] ribble got in touch with us to see if we wanted to travel up and pay them a visit ride some of their bikes on their local roads we said yes please now as a brand they've been around for a long time actually they've been based up here in the north of england building bike frames since 1897. yes 1897. now a lot has changed since then i mean gravel bikes have been invented for a start but they are still going from strength to strength in fact we're just going to visit them at their new concept store which is open in a pretty little town called clitherow it's surrounded by some awesome riding [Applause] oh we made it yeah check this out [Music] ribble is one of a few brands that offers a choice of components on your bike as well as custom color and paint options and in addition to that they offer a choice of frame materials and i can't really think of another brand that offers this much choice this is available on their endurance road bikes as well as their cross gravel road platform the cgr and this gives us the perfect opportunity to explore the differences that different frame materials actually makes so who's riding which bike then easy carbon i'm going for that lighter stiffer more aero although that titanium one does look incredible in fact that steel one as well oh it's very smart isn't it steel is real yeah but have you seen the price of this aluminium one absolute bargain i thought that might be over the street but if do you mind i'm a big fan of aluminium bikes do you mind if i take that one i know it's the most affordable are we going are you going up any steep climbs yeah we are actually yeah carmen shotgun carbon we've got the carbon all right i've actually never ridden a titanium bike so i'm going to go from that but okay there there's only three of us and there's four bikes here um ah got a plan oh [Music] uh anybody want to go for a bike ride [Music] but yeah guys no that is no yeah that's jamie burrows but back in the day when no british cyclist really won anything jamie bought the trend like he was under 23 world cup champion ended up on us what he was lance armstrong's teammate yeah poor guy want to go jamie ready for a bite right yes please show us the way we'll do [Music] so before we take a closer look at the tech specs of these bikes which ones are most popular the sales statistics have aluminium the most popular 56 percent of sales titanium are still both the same at 13 and then 18 for carbon so that's quite interesting actually because that shows that aluminium is the most popular which could be down to the cost maybe a bit cheaper than the others but the other three materials are all fairly comparable so we already know that the geometry is the same across all of the different material frames but when you sort of engineer and design these frames are you trying to make them feel the same or you play into the strengths of each sort of materials properties yeah yeah obviously you've got to play to the strength of these materials properties i mean he's pretty much just giving the customer a choice of uh frame material without sacrificing uh comfort and feel on the bike yeah so you can kind of advise them on the strengths of different properties and the materials and then they've got that free choice that's right i'm pretty much down to what kind of riding as well i mean when we launched the cgi category obviously as it says as the initial stand for across gravel road um you know we've had it for three years now and initially gravel wasn't really a big thing in the uk um and initial sales were pretty much for i'd say seen across commuting and winter bikes yeah so ally was obviously the logical choice good clearance takes 45 mil tyres 50 mud guards in there and i think as gravel's come on yeah we've seen uh the other materials come on as well [Music] thank you now whilst we're doing a bit of faffing around i thought i'd talk you through this my cgr al as we've just heard from jamie it's the most popular frame material in this bike and for good reason but it wasn't always this way with aluminium when it was first introduced to bikes in the 70s and the 80s it was very flexible and it had a tendency to snap not that that stopped sean kelly from winning a bunch of races on it but it wasn't until we'd worked out how to weld it and the benefits of vastly oversizing the tubing that it then started to gain popularity but it still had a bad rap legend has it was that it was so harsh to ride and transmitted so much buzz that it would take hours after you've got home for you to regain feeling in your hands and also your backside but not anymore not by a long shot construction techniques of aluminium have moved into another dimension now part of the reason those early bikes were so harsh was because the shape of the tubes were just that they were tubes and so their stiffness properties were constant in every direction if you want a bike that was stiff to pedal it was also going to be stiff vertically as well but thanks to heavy investment in aluminium technology principally in asia we've got all sorts of different construction techniques one of the big ones is hydroforming which is where the tubes can be manipulated into all sorts of different shapes so the down tube here is clearly d-shaped so you can have stiffness properties that vary in different dimensions now add in an advanced knowledge of butting which is where the thickness of the tubes varies along their length meaning that parts of this bike could be less than a millimeter thick whilst others considerably more so now what this means is that the material which is naturally very soft is able to keep this key character trait even when it's made into a bike but yet still giving you a bike that's stiff both in terms of pedaling and also steering if aluminium is the material of the people then titanium is very much the opposite a material that oozes luxury is rare it's corrosion resistant it's ultra strong and it requires an immense level of skill and expertise to work with when compared to aluminium titanium is approximately 60 more dense yet roughly twice as strong it has a particularly high yield strength and there's just no substitute for titanium when it comes to applications that require high stress but also are required to be lightweight just 0.63 of the earth's crust is made up from titanium any more than that it doesn't occur naturally and it has to be sort of mined and processed from other materials and as such adds further to the sourcing and production costs of titanium and as well as being particularly tricky to work with it has to be welded in an oxygen free environment forming it into tube shapes is also particularly tricky and costly and it just takes a considerable amount of time to craft a frame such as this what is it with us humans and our desire and lust to have such rare exotic and shiny materials [Music] i've just borrowed jamie's bike for a second to tell you about it it's steel which is real phrase you're as likely to have heard from a grizzled old road rider as a trendy young hipster and for good reason because steel is about as traditional as it gets for bite materials as we heard earlier on rebel have been making bikes out of it since 1897 but it doesn't mean that it stood still in its development now as you probably know steel is made almost entirely out of iron which unlike titanium is very abundant and it's also easy to mine so the cost of the raw material to the end user is significantly reduced plus it's also easier to work with i mean this can be butted and bent and brazed and welded to its heart's content and still come back for more this bike which is the cgr725 is made out of reynolds 725 that's right which is a tube set that's triple butted and heat treated the heat treatment makes the steel particularly strong and the butting means that the tube thicknesses can vary so you can get really thin tubes in areas of low stress which really draws out the kind of the ride quality that you get from steel that's sort of that zing that it's famous for this tube set can also be tig welded as well and you have to look pretty close to see the worlds on here because they are super neat now steel might be denser than titanium but it is as strong although i suspect that a lot of people that are buying steel bikes do so for more than just the performance characteristics of all the frame materials this one has more of a reputation and a tradition than any of the others so it speaks of adventure and resilience and robustness and reliability a bike that can handle anything you throw at it except for perhaps salt water but of course while steel might rust when it's painted and it's treated inside that's not anything you need to worry about [Music] this is the rebel cgr sl carbon it's got an absolutely mega spec we've got zip 303 sram force etap one by group set on there and the frame set weighs just a kilo now carbon right i mean i probably don't need to tell you much about carbon it's all the bike industry's been going on about for the last 20 years that's for good reason i mean it's an incredibly lightweight material it's very strong it's very stiff in fact it's well six times less dense than steel typically and typically you know half the density of aluminium but it's not all just about being lightweight carbon can be tunable and moldable and that allows us to create shapes that you just can't create with steel titanium or aluminium such as this aerodynamic down tube or this really really cool aerodynamic profile we've got on the handlebar but also by refining and tuning the carbon layup and the orientation of the fibres you can introduce compliance and comfort into a frame in a way that you just can't with the other materials that then combined with special shaping allows features such as the seat stays on this bike to add increased comfort and it's for these reasons that carbon fiber bikes have become the choice the only choice of pro bike riders and any performance orientated cyclists despite this carbon frames do have their critics with some people claiming they lack soul feeling or heart that they're just cheap molded and plasticky well this is just pure ignorance it's a total myth the number of hours that goes into producing a carbon frame and the skilled labor is immense they all require lots of individual precise pieces of carbon fiber to be intricately cut out and then painstakingly laid up in a very precise layer which is then placed into very expensive molds and then after that the frames are hand finished in all the number of human hands-on hours required to make a frame like this is far far higher than that of any of the other materials we have here today [Music] now this isn't a competition today or at least not any more than usual but it'd be wrong given that we've got the opportunity not to put these bikes head to head and we're going to start with one of the big ones weight definitely not the be all and end all when it comes to buying a bike but it's important to a lot of us actually right now it's really important to ask for because we are dragging ourselves up the trough of bowline if we ignore the fork the group set and the component options that are on these bikes of which there are a plethora of options we're left with just a bare frame and this is by far the lightest the sl carbon frame comes in at just over a kilo and when you're riding up a steep gradient like this that lower weight really is noticeable especially when you attack and dance away from your mates of the climb 450 grams behind carbon is titanium using the most popular titanium alloy 3al 2.5 vanadium this frame comes in at a rather felt 1600 grams not as light as its carbon brother but considering its material properties and its intended use of off-road as well as on that's impressive only 80 grams behind titanium though is our aluminium frame with a frame weight of just 1 680 grams bringing up the rear is the stoic steel the heaviest of this bunch this 725 reynolds frame comes in at 2 300 grams that's twice the weight of the cgr carbon and sure it takes a bit more to get going but once you're up to speed it's just going to keep on rolling plus is speed necessarily the most important thing not if you're going to load this up with bike packing bags galore [Music] right here jamie no sorry you can't throw rocks just thought well i just want to demonstrate the robustness and and strength and durability of alex's titanium frame i mean definitely be able to take it wouldn't it i don't know about that but i definitely don't think you should try throwing rocks at bikes certainly not whilst jamie's here that would be an interesting test although rather wasteful and they've been lots of myths in the bike industry about what materials are or what materials aren't particularly strong but the reality of it is the robustness of a frame is down to a number of different things you might hear phrases such as tensile strength megapascals weaves or even yield strength but let's put this myth to bed because all of these materials are robust they quite simply wouldn't make it into production otherwise that's it end of where they differ is how they are engineered and how this affects their material properties and how they respond to different stresses in the case of steel titanium and aluminium alloy bikes they're engineered and formed into a single consistent material whereas carbon bikes are made from well strands of stiff carbon fibers then in a composite material with a flexible resin what this means is the metal frames will dent and bend when put under undue stress whereas carbon frames simply won't and one of the classic weak points of metal frames are the areas that are under constant stress such as where the down tube meets the bottom bracket for example and it's a potential area to highlight that fatigue after many hundreds of thousands of kilometers carbon fiber doesn't suffer from the same fatigue issues that alloys do meaning that well in theory it has a longer shelf life it can be more susceptible to big heavy impacts though especially when you're dealing with super lightweight carbon frames but bear in mind it is repairable the most important thing about robustness is weight and engineering super light road bikes for example have less material and are far more susceptible to nox and bangs although they are perfectly strong enough in their intended direction and it's the reason why do it all bikes like such as this are a little bit heavier than standard road bikes because they're they're designed to withstand all sorts of different punishments take the cgr 725 for example that's tough as old boots right guys this is where me and my bike are gonna excel onto the rough stuff tires maybe mate mostly the tyres [Music] i mean when you think about like the the ten star strength of steel versus that of titanium i mean it's kind of no one i'm sorry guys but you know nice right image of it i've got to go now ah you got to go yeah family junior beckons okay mate well thank you so much for showing us your roads and your bikes as well that's been good thanks so much yes see you next time hope you make it back in time thank you yeah when you consider the x-ray crystal graphic structure of titanium cumin lattice that it can actually form that's you know incredibly wide [Applause] [Music] okay guys we're not far from base now we haven't talked about ride quality yet that is one of the big ones it's also impossible to quantify so this is all on feel can i get started my observation on this one right the most significant thing on this bike in terms of comfort is the carbon seat post okay and the alloy rails on the saddle you can visibly see it flexing and it makes a huge difference so even though the frame is alloy the fact that the fork is carbon and the seat post is carbon gives it a lot of comfort i thought that was really interesting you know that the frame was less important than i perhaps thought it would be well aficionados will tell you that titanium has a certain zing to it did you feel it i can't say that i felt it so far i think that's partly down to the fact that i've got the same carbon seat post as you which has got obviously a lot of compliance built into it same fork i've got the same carbon fork as well and it's also partly down to these 47 millimeter wide quite chunky tires i've got here so i think that's taking partly that away but what i can say is that out of the saddle climbing i can feel the stiffness in the bottom bracket area which which is quite nice because it feels quite good on the climbs yeah yeah i mean having ridden over the years like every single type of frame material in various bikes i'm just a massive fan of carbon and i think as we mentioned earlier the the fact that you can tune carbon you can tune the layup and how you orientate the fibres to build in compliance but also you can have any tube shape you like within reason and that can also massively improve the comfort and the ride quality as well so the seat post great example on this bike it's different from the round seat post you have on your bikes we've got a d shaped cross section this would be really hard to engineer into an alloy frame but you can do it with carbon and these d-shaped cross-sections they do offer you know greater compliance and the other features such as the seat stays as well you know they can be engineered and this bike's a great example of it in a way that can give you much more comfort and all around car bikes just feel really plush they're really nice absorbing that road buzz they do and so far i i borrowed your bike briefly and uh it did feel very responsive admittedly it's got a different build to this one you've got zip303s wheels on there which are very nice but it did it did feel like you can feel that reduced weight i think and you can and you can feel that stiffness in the bottom bracket that does make it just that little bit more responsive whenever you accelerate on like especially like a steep climb it's perceptible isn't it you can feel the difference with the light yeah a nice light carbon machine yeah now jamie was right we are rabbiting on a lot here but he's not here to talk about his steel bike talking about weight now of course that was the heavier one and whilst it might have a bit of a penalty going uphill yeah as soon as it's going faster particularly when it's rougher that extra weight actually is really good right that extra inertia helps you maintain that speed and interestingly i was chatting to someone at the concept store earlier one of the members of staff who owned that cgr 725 and he was saying he bought it because it was slightly less stiff than the carbon frame he wanted a little bit more movement a bit more life in that frame yeah it's really important for us isn't it yeah but also like you know compliance like laterally you know he wanted that extra life and having an overly stiff bike isn't necessarily the be on an end certainly not in fact it's a good point it's getting dark in it we really have gone on should we start coming back to base yeah yeah come on cycle across oh i'm gonna ride on the gravel i can't clip in he goes [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] cheers guys cheers that was a good ride i'll come up again to ride my push bike for sure now we've ridden our bikes a lot today there is one inescapable truth that we haven't touched on yet cost my aluminium bike without doubt the winner here most affordable bike 600 pounds for the frame and fork and that's the same thought that you guys have been riding on your more expensive bikes as well next comes the steel at 800 quid that's a steal that is a steal um and then after that you got well carbon at 1300 um and then actually top of the tree is the titanium at 1800. but the relative cost of the different frames is well it's because of the cost of the raw materials but also the manufacturing process associated with those materials so although carbon as a raw material is relatively cheap the cost of manufacturing it laying it up producing those expensive molds that is a very costly process yeah now all of these bikes clearly they're as capable as each other we've all gone on the same ride we've all got big grins on our faces but whilst there's no winner here which one easy tiger oh which one would you choose i'm going to stick with what i've been riding all day i'm going to go with the titanium really i know like it's the most expensive one but there's something about it when you pick it up it's got a sort of just the feel of it is something special and just knowing that you've got an item of luxury that is a bit rarer yeah that's that does it for me yeah fair enough ollie titanium i agree it has a nice tactile feel to it yeah and if i was racing and you know obsessed with performance like maybe doing gravel racing whatever then yeah the carbon definitely without a doubt but for just all round use having fun on a bike adventures exploring an all-rounder i'd like the titanium too well i wonder where that's partly because because it's new because we we're blessed with riding carbon bikes day to day for me if money was an object i'd go for the carbon bike 100 pure performance lightweight stiffness compliance yeah but if i had budget constraints i'd definitely go with the aluminium one and then spec up the components so rather than getting a carbon frame and then get more affordable components i'd get an aluminium frame and then get more expensive components you basically want all these wheels on it i basically want deep section carbon wheels so it looks super cool and every time i get a garage i'm like yes i am riding that and that is really important at the end of day that you've got to love the look of your bike yeah i want my wheels on your bike as well yeah could have a little play around later can we just switch them all around let us know in the comment section down below which frame material you choose and why yeah and big thanks to ribble today for hosting us and letting us ride these amazing bikes yeah right food i think yeah come on come on give this video a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it that way is it yeah this way

Channel: Global Cycling Network

Views: 1,442,309

Keywords: ribble, cgr, cross, cyclocross, gravel, road, ribble bikes, test, compare, titanium, ti, aluminium, alu, alloy, carbon, carbon fibre, steel, steel frame, steel is real, ribble concept store, ribble valley, north west, north, clitheroe, GCN, Global Cycling Network, Sports, Cycling, Bike, Bikes, Bicycle (Product Category), Road Bike, Cyclist, Road Bicycle, GCN Cycling, velo, si, simon, richardson, ollie, oliver, bridgewood, alex, paton, sec-feature, gc11shs, ꗧ, ଐ, r1, gc11sas, ସ, ホ, ᠫ, ᢙ, ዩ, ළ, Բ, Ժ, Լ, Ծ, Ձ, ፕ15, ズ, ኾ, ꘎, ዮ, 4338

Id: vcOKfTnRIII

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021