Carbon VS Aluminium VS Titanium VS Steel | The Bike Frame Material Showdown: Which Is Best?

In life there are often multiple ways to reach the same goal, different paths that lead to the same destination, or variations of a recipe that give you the same dish. Now many times those options are simple like a comfortable armchair on a wooden bench or a cup of coffee. coffee with a cup of discomfort, but sometimes those options are bewildering and leave us reeling not knowing

which

way to go next. What if you were presented with four different armchairs with only slightly different fabrics or four cups of black coffee with a slightly different roast, not so much?

So it's easy and that's what we're facing today. I really thought we were here to ride

bike

s. I just loaded all four in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, don't worry, Alex, we are what we have here. four

bike

s that represent a choice many of us face,

which

frame

material

should you choose now, we have four bikes here from the same manufacturer, ribble, based on their same platform that does it all, the cgr, the main difference between them is in the

frame

material

we have

titanium

we have aluminum we have

steel

and we have

carbon

what are their relative attributes and strengths is one better than another ribble contacted us to see if we wanted to ride and visit them, ride some of their bikes on your local roads, we said yes please now as a brand they have been around for a long time in fact they are based here in the north of england making bicycle frames since 1897. yes. 1897.

Now a lot has changed since then, I mean gravel bikes were invented to begin with, but they are still going from strength to strength. In fact, we will visit them in their new concept store that is open in a fairly small place. a town called Clitherow is surrounded by amazing driving, oh we did it, yeah check this out. Ribble is one of the few brands that offers a variety of components for your bike, as well as custom color and paint options, and on top of that, they offer a choice. of frame materials and I really can't think of another brand that offers so many options.

It's 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 between the different frames. The materials actually do, so who rides which bike? So, easy

carbon

, I'm going for that lighter, stiffer, more aerodynamic one, although the

titanium

one looks amazing, in fact, the

steel

one too, oh, it's very clever, isn't it? Steel is real, yes, but have you done it? I've seen the price of this aluminum bike, an absolute bargain. I thought it might be on the street, but if you care, I'm a big fan of aluminum bikes.

Do you mind if I take that one? I know it is the most affordable. Come on? going up steep climbs, yes we actually are, yes Carmen Shotgun Carbon, we got the carbon right. I've never actually ridden a titanium bike, so I'm going to pass on that, but it's okay, there are only three of us and there are four of us. bikes here um ah I have a plan oh uh someone wants to go for a bike ride but yeah guys no that's no no yeah that's Jamie Burrows but back in the day when no British cyclist really won anything Jamie she bought into the trend like she was under 23.

The cup champion finished with us. What it was. Lance Armstrong's teammate. Yes, poor boy, I want to go, Jamie, ready for a bite. Yes, please show us how we will do it before we take a closer look at the technical specifications of these bikes. Which is it? are the most popular, the sales statistics have aluminum, 56 percent of the most popular sales, titanium, they remain the same at 13 and then 18 for carbon, which is actually quite interesting because that shows that aluminum It is the most popular, which could perhaps be due to cost. a little cheaper than the others, but the other three materials are quite comparable, so we already know that the geometry is the same in all the different material frames, but when you design and style these frames, do you try to make them feel the same? ?

Same thing or you play with the strengths of each type of material properties, yes, yes, obviously, you have to play with the strength of the properties of these materials. I mean, you're pretty much just giving the customer the option of choosing the frame material without sacrificing comfort and feel. on the bike, yes, so you can advise them on the strengths of different properties and materials and then they have that freedom of choice. That's right, I'm also pretty clear about what kind of driving I'm talking about when we launched the cgi category, obviously, as it says as the initial support to cross the gravel road, you know, we've had it for three years and initially the gravel was not really a big thing in the UK, and the initial sales were so-so for me.

Let's say you see it on commuter and winter bikes, yes, so ally was obviously the logical choice. Good clearance requires 45 mil tires, 50 fenders there and I think as the gravel shows up, yeah, we've seen the other materials show up too, thanks now. We're joking a little. I thought I'd explain this to you, my boss, since we just heard from Jamie. It's the most popular frame material on this bike and for good reason, but it wasn't always that way. With aluminum, when it was first introduced on bikes in the '70s and '80s, it was very flexible and had a tendency to break, but that didn't stop Sean Kelly from winning a lot of races with it, but it wasn't until we worked .

After discovering how to solder it and the benefits of greatly oversizing the tube, it began to gain popularity, but it still had a bad reputation, according to legend, being that it was so hard to handle and transmitted so much hum that it would be hours later. I have a home for you to recover the feeling in your hands and also in your butt, but not anymore, far from it, aluminum construction techniques have moved to another dimension. Now part of the reason those early bikes were so stiff was because the shape of the tubes were simply tubes, so their stiffness properties were constant in all directions.

If you want a bike that was stiff to pedal, it would also be stiff vertically, but thanks to the huge investment in aluminum technology, mainly in Asia, we have all kinds of different construction techniques, one of the most important is hydroforming, which is where tubes can be manipulated into all sorts of different shapes, so the down tube here is clearly D-shaped, so it can have stiffness properties that vary in different dimensions. Now add some advanced knowledge of splicing, which is where the thickness of tubes varies along their length, meaning some parts of this bike could be less than a millimeter thick, while others considerably more.

Now what this means is that the material that is naturally very Soft is able to maintain this key character trait even when converted into a bicycle, but still gives you a bike that is stiff in both terms of pedaling and steering. . If aluminum is people's material, then titanium is a very opposite material. It oozes luxury It is rare It is corrosion resistant It is ultra strong and requires an immense level of skill and experience to work compared to aluminum Titanium is approximately 60% denser but approximately twice as strong It has a particularly high yield strength and is simply There is no substitute for titanium when it comes to applications that require high stress but must also be lightweight, only 0.63 of the earth's crust is made of titanium, on top of that it does not occur naturally and has to be extracted and processed. of other materials and, as such, further increases the costs of sourcing and producing titanium and, in addition to being particularly complicated to work with, it must be welded in an oxygen-free environment, shaping it into a tube is also particularly complicated and expensive, and it simply takes a considerable amount of time to create a painting like this.

What is it with us humans and our desire and lust to have such rare, exotic and shiny materials? I just borrowed Jamie's bike for a second to tell him. It's steel. is a real phrase that you've probably heard from both a grizzled old road cyclist and a modern young hipster and for good reason because steel is as traditional as it gets for biting materials, as we heard previously at Rebel have been making bicycles with since 1897, but that does not mean that it has stopped in its development now, as you probably know that steel is made almost entirely of iron which, unlike titanium, is very abundant and is also easy to extract, so the cost of the raw material for the end user is significantly reduced and it is also easier to work with.

I mean, you can join, bend, weld, and solder to your heart's content and still come back for more. This bike, which is the cgr725, is made of Reynolds 725. That's right. a set of triple butted and heat treated tubes. Heat treatment makes the steel particularly strong and butting means that tube thicknesses can vary so you can get really thin tubes in low stress areas, which really highlights the type of ride quality you get from steel. which has that shine for which it is famous. This set of tubes can also be TIG welded and you have to look very closely to see the worlds here because they are super clean now.

Steel may be denser than titanium, but it is just as strong, although I suspect that many people who buy steel bikes do so for more than just the performance characteristics of all the frame materials, it has more reputation and tradition than any of the others, so it speaks of adventure. and resilience, sturdiness and reliability, a bike that can withstand anything you throw at it, except maybe salt water, but of course, although steel can rust when it's painted and treated on the inside, that's not something you need to worry about , this is the rebel cgr sl carbon. it's got an absolutely mega spec, we've got zip 303 sram force etap one per groupset set up there and the frameset weighs only a kilo now it's carbon right, I mean I probably don't need to tell you much about carbon, it's the whole bike.

The industry has been going for the last 20 years and it's for good reason, I mean, it's an incredibly light material, it's very strong, it's very rigid, in fact, it's six times less dense than steel usually and, You usually know it's half the density of aluminum, but it's not. It's all about being lightweight, carbon can be tunable and moldable and that allows us to create shapes that just can't be created with steel, titanium or aluminum, like this aerodynamic down tube or this really cool aero profile we have on the handlebars. but also by refining and adjusting the carbon layout and fiber orientation you can introduce flexibility and comfort into a frame in a way that cannot be achieved with other materials which then, combined with a special shape, allow for features such as seat stays. . on this bike to add extra comfort and it is for these reasons that carbon fiber bikes have become the only option for professional cyclists and any performance oriented rider.

Despite this, carbon frames have their critics and some people claim that they lack feeling or heart. that they are just cheap tacky moldings, this is pure ignorance, it is a total myth, the number of hours it takes to produce a carbon frame and the skilled labor is immense, they all require many precise individual pieces of carbon fiber to be intricately. They are cut and then painstakingly placed in a very precise layer which is then placed into very expensive molds and then the frames are finished by hand in all the amount of human labor hours required to make a frame like this is much greater. than any of the other materials we have here today, this is not a competition today or at least no more than usual, but it would be a mistake given that we have the opportunity not to face these bikes. and let's start with one of the big ones, weight is definitely not the end all be all when it comes to buying a bike but it is important for many of us, in fact right now it is very important to ask because we are dragging We get on the bowl channel if we ignore the fork, groupset and component options that are on these bikes, of which there are a huge number of options, we are left with just a bare frame and this is by far the lightest, the sl carbon.

The frame weighs just over a kilo and when you climb a steep slope like this, that lower weight really shows, especially when you attack and dance away from your climbing companions. 450 grams behind carbon is titanium, using the most popular titanium. 3al 2.5 vanadium alloy, this frame has a weight of 1600 grams, it is not as light as its carbon brother, but considering the properties of the material and its intended use both in everythingterrain and road, that's impressive, although only 80 grams behind the titanium is our aluminum frame. With a frame weight of just 1680 grams at the rear, Stoic Steel is the heaviest of this group, this 725 Reynolds frame weighs 2300 grams, which is double the weight of CGR carbon and it sure takes a bit more to get going. but once you get up to speed, you'll keep rolling and besides speed is necessarily the most important thing, not if you're going to load this up with bike packing bags galore right here Jamie, no, sorry, you can't throw rocks.

I thought well, I just want to demonstrate the sturdiness, strength and durability of Alex's titanium frame. I mean, he would definitely be able to handle it, right? I don't know about that, but I definitely don't think you should try to throw rocks at him. bikes certainly not while Jamie is here, that would be an interesting test, although quite wasteful, and there have been many myths in the bike industry about what materials are or are not particularly strong, but the reality is the sturdiness of a frame . It comes down to a number of different things, you may hear phrases like megapascal tensile strength fabrics or even yield strength, but let's put this myth to rest because all of these materials are robust, they simply wouldn't be produced, otherwise, that's the ending in which they differ. how they are designed and how this affects the properties of their materials and how they respond to different stresses.

For steel, titanium and aluminum alloy bikes, they are designed and formed from a single consistent material, while carbon bikes are made from strands of rigid carbon. fibers then into a composite material with a flexible resin, what this means is that metal frames will dent and bend when subjected to undue stress, while carbon frames simply will not and one of the weak points Classic metal frames are areas that are under constant pressure. stress, such as where the down tube meets the bottom bracket, for example, and is a potential area to highlight that fatigue after many hundreds of thousands of kilometers carbon fiber does not suffer the same fatigue problems than alloys, which means, in theory, yes.

Having a longer lifespan, it may be more susceptible to large hard impacts, especially when it comes to super light carbon frames, but keep in mind that it is repairable. The most important thing about robustness is weight and engineering. Super light road bikes for example have less material and are much more susceptible to nox and knocks, although they are strong enough in the intended direction and is the reason why all bikes like this are a little heavier than Standard road bikes because they are designed to take all sorts of different punishment, take the CGR 725 for example which is tough as old boots, guys this is where my bike and I are going to excel on the tough terrain.

The tires maybe mostly match the tires, I mean, when you think about all ten. The star strength of steel versus titanium, I mean, it's kind of like nobody's business. Sorry guys, but you know, it's a good image. I have to go now, ah, you have to go, yeah, the junior family is calling, okay, buddy, well, thank you very much. A lot for showing us their paths and their bikes too, that has been good. Thank you so much. Yes, see you next time. I hope you come back in time. Thank you. Yes, when you consider the X-ray crystal graph structure of the titanium cumin lattice, it really can. shape, you know, incredibly wide, well guys we're not far from the base, now we haven't talked about ride quality yet, that's one of the most important ones, it's also impossible to quantify, so this all depends of the sensation, can I begin my observation?

This is true, the most important thing about this bike in terms of comfort is the carbon seatpost and the alloy rails on the seat, you can see it visibly flexing and it makes a big difference, so although the frame is alloy , the fact that the fork is carbon and the seat post is carbon, which gives it a lot of comfort. I thought it was really interesting. You know the painting was less important than maybe I thought it would be. Hobbyists will tell you that titanium has a certain edge to it. you feel it, I can't say I felt it until now, I think that's partly due to the fact that I have the same carbon seatpost as you, which obviously has a lot of compliance built into the same fork that I have.

I also have the same carbon fork and it's also partly due to these fairly thick 47 millimeter wide tires that I have here, so I think that's partly taking it away, but what I can say is that when I get in the saddle I can feel the stiffness. in the bottom bracket area, which is pretty good because it feels pretty good on the climbs, yeah yeah, I mean having raced over the years with every type of frame material on various bikes. I'm just a big fan of carbon and I think we mentioned earlier the fact that you can adjust the carbon, you can adjust the layup and how to orient the fibers to achieve compliance, but you can also have any tube shape you want within reason and That can also greatly improve comfort and ride quality.

Also the seat post is a great example on this bike, it's different from the round seat post their bikes have. We have a D-shaped cross section. This would be very difficult to design on an alloy frame, but it can be done with carbon and These D-shaped cross sections offer you greater compliance and other features, such as seatstays, also know that can be designed and this bike is a great example of that in a way that can give you a lot more comfort and around cars the bikes feel really luxurious they are very nice absorbing the road hum that they make and so far I took lent your bike briefly and it felt very responsive, the truth is that it has a different construction than this one, you have zip303s wheels. there, which are very nice, but it felt like you could feel that reduced weight, I think, and you can and you can feel that stiffness in the bottom bracket that makes it a little more responsive every time you accelerate, especially as a steep climb is noticeable, right?

You can feel the difference with the light. Yes, a nice light carbon machine. Yes, Jamie was right. We're talking about a lot of things here, but he's not here to talk about his steel bike, talk about the weight. Of course, that was the heaviest and while it might have a little penalty when going uphill, yes, as soon as you go faster, especially when it's harder, that extra weight is actually really good, that extra inertia will give you It helps to maintain that speed and, interestingly, he was chatting. He told someone in the concept store earlier, one of the staff who owned that cgr 725, that he bought it because it was a little less stiff than the carbon frame, he wanted a little more movement, a little more life in that painting, yes.

It's very important to us, isn't it? But you also know that compliance is lateral, you know he wanted that extra life and having a bike that's too stiff isn't necessarily the end all be all, certainly not, in fact it's a good point. dark on this, we've really moved on, we should start heading back to base, yeah, yeah, come on, we cycle across, oh, I'm going to ride on the gravel, I can't get hooked, he's going, cheers, cheers, it was a good ride , I will go. I'm sure I'll get back on my push bike now that we've ridden our bikes a lot today, there's one inescapable truth we haven't mentioned yet.

It cost my aluminum bike, hands down the winner here, the most affordable bike, £600 for frame and fork and that's the same thinking you guys have been putting on your more expensive bikes, then comes the steel at £800, that's a bargain, that's a bargain, um and after that they got the carbon right at 1300 um and then actually the top of the tree is the titanium at 1800. But the relative cost of the different frames is Well, it's due to the cost of the raw materials, but also the manufacturing process associated with those materials, so even though carbon as a raw material is relatively cheap, the manufacturing cost. to fit it, producing those expensive molds is a very expensive process, yes now all these bikes are clearly just as capable as each other, we have all been on the same journey, we all have big smiles on our faces, but while here there is no winner which tiger easy oh, which one would you choose?

I'm going to continue with what I've been riding all day. I'm going to go with the titanium. I really know it's the most expensive, but there's something. about that, when you pick it up, it has a kind of feeling that it's something special and just knowing that you have a luxury item that's a little bit rarer, yeah, that's enough for me, yeah, that's fair , Ollie Titanium. Okay, it has a nice tactile feel, yeah, and if I was racing and you know I'm obsessed with performance, like maybe doing gravel racing, whatever, then yeah, carbon definitely without a doubt, but just for general use, having fun on a bike, adventures, exploring and everything. -Rounder, I would also like titanium.

I wonder where that is partly because it's new because we're lucky enough to ride carbon bikes day to day for me. If money was an objective, I would choose the 100 pure performance carbon bike. Compliance with stiffness and light weight, yes, but if I had budget constraints, I would definitely go with the aluminum and then spec the components, so instead of buying a carbon frame and then getting more affordable components, I would buy an aluminum frame and then it would be more expensive. components basically you want all these wheels, basically I want deep section carbon wheels so it looks super cool and every time I get to a garage I say, yeah, I'm riding that and that's really important at the end of the day, that you got me They will love the look of your bike.

Yes, I want my wheels on your bike too. Yes. We could play a little later. Can we just change them? Let us know in the comments section below which frame material you choose and why. Yes, and a big thank you to Ribble today for taking us in and letting us ride these amazing bikes. Yeah, good food, I think so, come on, give this video a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it that way, is that right?