A shape to be lovingly photographed for art magazines, not ridden
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tarcklebee for excellent bike part brand ethos meme
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Beat me to it
OneUp has a dropper paddle remote for SRAM 11s:
I would totally launch the whole assembly across the garage at 3:00:
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It kind of makes sense if youve ever tried to track down innards for these things. Its all the small companies that come up with the hacks for sram.
Anyone with one of the 686XCadence jackets want to add to the collection?
Interesting tubing spec on the Standert Pfadfinder:
I’m constantly aggrieved by how little detail is given to the tubing choice in modern steel frame bikes. Everyone meme’d themselves into “Science™ says every frame material rides the same so we’ll just use whatever factory best practice” which means interesting tubing choices are buried in blurry screenshots or junk marketing doublespeak.
I had the Standert gravel bike on my short list last year but didn’t buy because it seemed like another spec 9-7-9 steel bike that was overpriced. This unintentional disclosure of the frame tubing for this bike makes it seem that probably isn’t the case.
I’m not saying everyone should do the full100-page detail PDF from Fairlight, but it would be nice if people selling ostensibly high-end production frames advertised the tubing thickness. A OS(double?) all-road bike with .6/.45/.6 tubing is something different and exciting.
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I am once again asking for everyone to do the full 100 page detail PDF for boutique frames, if you don’t do that you’re trading on vibes and a cool livery
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The Crust Gambit - bigtime vibes appeal but there’s also a secret slack where you can go and ask for tubing specs from jdgesus, if you care enough.
Most companies try to do the first part but nobody even bothers with the second part! We demand 100pg PDFs, vibes, cool livery AND a secret slack! 
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I think it’s funny how aluminum bikes seem to avoid the butting hype that steel and sometimes Ti get.
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Aluminum bikes used to tout tubing specs. Easton stuff was a big deal. A lot of the triple butted Easton Elite 7005 stuff was very light. Kinda disposable, though. Even I killed a few. Oh, and Scandium!
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Banshee is good about that, their site describes how they eke every bit of awesomeness out of the material they can. Never thought about what ‘internal ribbing’ looks like until I saw their chainstay cutaways.
I want to see @drwelby weigh in on this, too.
I think it was part of the overall realignment to present less technical information to the user, through the 1990s/early 2000s. Steel simplified into “double butted/cromoly/4130”, aluminum into 6000/7000 series, and CF into whatever in-house branding sounded cool.
One of my pet theories is the relative price of color photography and printing dropped significantly and people are more swayed by pictures than numbers and charts. While at the same time, convincing engineering expertise became more expensive - or perhaps even gatekept from entering - did anybody replace Frank Berto?
Interested bike customer can read 200 very dry words from a marketing manager about why Raleigh chose aluminum tubing 1/16" thinner than before, or they can look at 10 sick pictures of Tinker Juarez getting rad on dirt with a 15 word dialogue balloon saying how awesome Cannondale 6000-T6 is.
Of course, lots of other things were happening (limited custom aluminum framebuilder mythmaking) but these are easy to pick out looking at the contemporary catalogs and magazines.
it’s basically free to include a couple technical pages in the hype pdf or product page discussing detail decisions for nerds though… doesn’t have to exclude the splashy photos
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Pushing the limit on materials means more warranties, and the “Steel is real” crowd wants the durability. So it’s often an easy decision.
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I think the barrier to nerdery for steel tubing is quite low nowadays due to the mystique of steel and eons of talk online. But realistically, there isn’t too much difference material between mid-tier production bikes. It really comes down to aesthetics, clearances, and rider fit. On the higher end there are bigger differences in perceived ride quality, but there are fairly significant durability and utility drawbacks.
Aluminum alloy bikes don’t have the same common knowledge base as steel. Even for VO, we had to do a lot of research into tubing availability and performance for our Chessie AL frame just because companies don’t talk about their frame specs bc most people don’t care. Similarly to steel, we found a double butted main triangle rode way nicer than straight gauge, but it is surprisingly uncommon on a production scale. To the point where we’re investing in custom mandrel bends to increase consistency in tube torsion/position during welding for the top tube. We’re planning on doing a whitepaper for this frameset when the time to presale gets closer.
Ti is so out of the price range of most people that the knowledge base is fairly low. And tbh there aren’t THAT many options for bikes. Plus other components are straight gauge anyway. Kinda underwhelming and surprisingly heavier than their AL counterparts.
What are we talking about again?
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A 44mm by 0.6 tube also seems kinda dumb. That’s bigger than what I use on trail bikes that are a foot longer. Going that thin is asking for fatigue failures. The problem with “white papers” is they are just marketing for nerds.
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