Photo by Milica Wren

You may have caught my little ranting on Twitter last night about how I just don’t get the desire to buy a 20-year old aluminum frame. It’s always strange to me why people will pay absurd amounts of money for an idolized aluminum frame like the 90’s Cannondales when they could get a custom bike for a couple hundred more and you’ll never have to own another bike.

Well, Ian at Icarus has a nice feature up on his blog called “Why Icarus? Why Steel?“. In it he addresses many questions and misconceptions. Did you know that the average Icarus frame weighs 3.5lbs and that’s without using any superlight, race specific tubing.

Photo by Milica Wren

So where do people get this whole misconception that steel is heavy and not stiff? A good framebuilder can design and build you a bike that suits your specific needs and if getting your ass hammered by a stiff tubeset is your desire, they can make it happen. Racing aluminum is one thing but chances are, if you put enough miles on aluminum on the road, carbon fork or not, you’ll notice a lot more muscle and joint fatigue. I have ridden enough aluminum to know that a 30 mile ride will really take it out of you whereas steel is always more forgiving.

Granted, the mass-produced steel frames of this new “track and fixed” era lack a lot of the qualities that I admire from my older steel bikes. SLX and MAX are two great tubesets but those aren’t the only options. True Temper and Columbus make a grip of tubesets that will offer you more than enough stiffness to get your siq fixed whip going down hills brah.

Enough of my rantings but remember, PROLLY SAYS STEEL IS REAL.

Go read Ian’s take on all this and be on the look out for the Norse x Icarus TRACK frameset soon!