News for January 6
Magnien Joins Festina
Jan. 4 - French rider Emmanuel Magnien, one of those riders left
without a contract following the demise of the Castorama team last
autumn, has joined the Andorran-based Festina squad. The 24-
year-old, winner of last year's Tour de L'Avenir and thought to be
one of French cycling's best prospects, officially joined the team
as of January 1st.
Racing Starts on 4 February in Europe
First Race of the official season:
In Italy, 4 February, la Coppa degli Etruschi at Donoratico.
First race on the International Calendar:
In France, 6 February, G.P. Apertura.
First Classic:
Milano-Sanremo (23 mar), (Primavera)
which starts off the World Cup, then
in April: Fiandre (7), (Ronde)
Parigi-Roubaix (14), (Pascale)
Liegi-Bastogne-Liegi (21) (Doyen)
Amstel (27). (Headache?)
The Big Tours and other notable events:
Giro d'Italia (18 May - 9 June)
Tour de France (29 June-21 July).
Atlanta: 31 July - Road Race/prova in linea,
3 August Time Trial/cronometro.
September: la Vuelta (from 7 to 29),
October:
Worlds, Lugano ( 3rd cronometro, 6th prova in linea)
Worlds Cup:
Parigi-Tours (13)
Lombardia (19)
Japan Club (Cup??) (27).
Italian Anniversary
Monday, January 8, l'Associazione Corridori Ciclisti
Professionisti Italiano, the Italian Pro Association, celebrates
50 years of service with a feed at the Ristorante Torri Bianche
di Vimercate (Milano)
UCI Faces Rider Discontent
The professional year underwent major surgery in 1995 with the Tour
of Spain moving from April to September and the World Championships
shifting from August to October. These changes caused a few
disgruntled noises from the peloton at the time they were
announced, but the inclusion of the late-October Japan Cup in the
1996 World Cup program has caused a chorus of protest.
According to Italian star Maurizio Fondriest, "It's getting harder
and harder to plan the season. The top riders have such different
ways of preparing for their goals that they rarely race against
each other. We think the calendar was better as it used to be."
Fondriest, Tony Rominger and Gianni Bugno are three of the top-
flight riders reportedly planning to express their concerns to UCI
President Hein Verbruggen.
Alfredo Martini, head of selection for the Italian national team,
agrees with the professionals. "The World Championships should be
held in August," he said, "when the riders are all still fresh and
competitive and cycling isn't competing for attention from other
sports."
Verbruggen will likely evaluate these views and opinions seriously.
The last time that the UCI came into conflict with the peloton was
in 1991 over the imposition of a hard shell helmet mandate. On that
occasion, the climax came in the form of a rider protest during the
Paris-Nice race.
Custom framebuilder Greg Fuquay on STEEL
So why do most builders use steel? To kick off with, steel has
been used in making bike frames for over 100 years. In anyone's
book, that's a lot of development and testing time... In that
time, it's been rolled, drawn, cold worked, butted, alloyed, heat
treated, brazed, welded, lugged, unlugged, oversized, undersized,
tapered, gussetted, annealed, used, abused... and loved. We've
also had the time to get to know a lot about how steel works. In
knowledge, there is comfort and safety...
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Steel has a lot of positive features, and it's available in a great
variety of types. If you want a triple butted tube with an ultimate
tensile strength of 160,000 psi, it's out there in steel but not in
other materials. Not yet!
This ability to `tune' the frame by using different types of tube
isn't exclusive to steel but in other materials it's limited to
tube size, shape and or wall thickness. Steel can also use varying
alloys or heat treatments in individual tubes to change the ride.
Of steel's mechanical properties, the important variables are yield
strength, ultimate tensile strength, elongation and fatigue
strength. Another important, but non variable mechanical property
is stiffness. The physical properties of thermal expansion, density
and corrosion resistance are also important and are not variable to
any great extent between different steels. This is starting to
sound like jargon. Let's run through these terms so you get a
better idea of what steel's about. Try to remember this stuff, it
may come in handy for what I'm going to be talking about in future
issues.
Strengths
Yield strength is the point at which the material permanently
deforms; in other words, the amount of force it would take to dent
or bend the material. Ultimate tensile strength is the point at
which the material breaks. The test to determine these facts is
simply pulling the tube with an increasing, measured force until it
yields and then breaks.
Good steels have yields from 90,000 psi to 170,000 psi and ultimate
tensile strengths from 100,000 psi to 190,000 psi. Keep in mind
these are pre weld strengths and they will drop when tubes are
joined. The actual amount of strength loss will depend on the
method of joining and skill of the person doing the joining; but
some loss will occur. That's physics!
Elongation is a measure of how far the tube stretches before it
breaks (from when it yields to when it breaks when pulled in
tension.) This is a good way of judging ductility. Ductility is
very important in a machine you ride over uneven terrain at speed
with solid objects around to hit. Simply stated, it's the ability
of a material to move instead of break.
Steel can be good at this, allowing you to ride home slowly instead
of walking after some big shunts and giving you a warning instead
of dumping you on your face... Personally, I like to use tubing
with highish elongation, 10-15% especially when welding. There are
tubes available with as little as 7%.
Fatigue strength is of course important in the long run. Steel
comes out pretty good here as well. Steel and titanium both enjoy a
fatigue limit, below which a tube can be loaded repeatedly without
failing.
Stiffness
Stiffness is measured by modulus of elasticity. Sounds cool, huh?
Steel has a better modulus than most other frame materials, roughly
twice that of titanium and three times that of aluminium. Modulus
doesn't change from tube to tube. All steel tubes of the same size
and wall thickness have the same modulus, regardless of heat
treatment or alloy.
Thermal expansion
Thermal expansion is measured by the coefficient of thermal
expansion. Believe me, you don't want to know the unit of measure;
this page isn't long enough... This gives an indication of how
susceptible to distortion a particular tube will be. Steel comes
out middle of the table here, between the other two main
framebuilding materials, titanium and aluminium.
Density
Now for the downside. Compared to the other guys, steel is dense.
Luckily for it though, its other properties, mostly its modulus and
fatigue limit, mean you can run it thinner than, say, aluminium for
example. And if the tubing is properly made, and proper design and
quality processing are used in production, steel can hold its own.
The other part of the downside is corrosion resistance, or in this
case, lack of it. All steels are predominantly iron with various
alloying elements; these want nothing more than to return to the
earth minerals they came from and blend back into the
countryside... Vigilance is needed to keep steel from this fate.
Steel must be kept clean, painted, dry and oiled. Stopping rust
before it begins is the best policy.
What's available?
Most steel tubing used in this country falls into three groups.
Chrome molybdenum, manganese molybdenum and nivacrom. These can be
further divided into seamed and seamless and heat treated and,
er... not heat treated.
Chrome molybdenum refers to the major alloying elements. Chromium
is used to increase strength and hardness (this is the stuff that
in amounts over 12% make stainless steel stainless), and molybdenum
which increases the high temperature creep resistance. Creep is the
straining of material under a constant stress, and a funny term...
In manganese molybdenum, the manganese also increases strength and
hardness and lowers the critical temperature. It's also used as a
de-oxidiser. It makes a tough steel with high hardenability.
Nivacrom: this steel's high strength is achieved by alloying
vanadium and niobium alongside the normal chromium. The vanadium
helps prevent inclusions in production and along with the niobium
helps prevent grain enlargement during heating while joining.
Seams
Most quality tubing used in this country is seamless. Meaning it's
produced from a solid billet of steel pierced and drawn to the
necessary dimensions.
Seamed tubes are produced by rolling sheet into a tube and welding
it up. The resulting pipe is then drawn down and cold worked to its
final dimensions; the seam is worked into the tube and becomes
invisible to all except electron microscopes... All True Temper
tubes are made this way, along with Columbus Cromor and Reynolds
501.
Heat Treatment
Heat treatment can do one of three things: anneal, temper or
harden.
Annealing isn't used often in cycle tubes. It involves heating the
tubes and letting them cool slowly, in a controlled sort of way of
course. This softens the tube.
Tempering is done by heating the material to 200-700 degrees C,
then quenching or air cooling it. This removes the internal
stresses. An example of this is True Temper AVR.
Hardening: this involves raising the steel to a higher temperature
and quenching it in oil or water. This raises strength and
hardness. Tange Prestige and Reynolds 753, True Temper OXII and
OXIII are just a few examples.
The future of steel
Even though steel has been around in bikes for a long time, it
still has some tricks left. The tubing manufacturers aren't going
to throw in the towel against the exotic metals just yet. Newer,
more innovative tubesets are appearing. With more sophisticated
building techniques becoming more common in the bike business
worldwide, tubing designers are able to produce tubes that are
right on the performance edge. Freed from lugs and the large heat
affected zones inherent in brazing steel tubes, manufacturers are
able to shorten the thick butted end of the tube, losing weight
without sacrificing strength.
Radical tubesets
Some examples of these newer, more radical tubesets include Ritchey
Prestige Logic, the father of these tubes: short butted ends,
thinner middle sections make for weight loss. The most radical of
the type is Columbus Genius. Short butts, but also shaped in the
direction of the stress. Very short on the low stress part of the
tube and longer on the high stress side. It's also thinner than
most. Columbus is now producing tubes with more conventional short
butts, using experience gained from Genius. These are more the
ticket, not as radical as Genius and cheaper to produce.
Cyber, Brain and Neuron, as these tubes are now called by the
Italians, are a step in the right direction. Short butt, weight
savings and good metallurgy with mixing of the tube strengths as
builders have done for years. Neuron even pushes forward a new
twist by having the butt proportioned ovally, being thicker top and
bottom and thinner on the sides where the stresses in this area are
less. Advances in steel aren't just limited to innovative forming.
Work is being done in metallurgy, new alloys and heat treatment.
Supersteel
By far the most impressive example of how far steel can go is
Aermet 100, an alloy steel made in the US, originally developed for
use in F18 fighter aircraft landing gear, a high stress application
if ever there was one! This stuff has an ultimate tensile strength
of 285,000psi! That compares to 195,000psi for Reynolds 753, the
highest of the conventional steel cycle tubes, and 130,000psi for
3.25 titanium. All that and 14% elongation too. It sounds too good
to be true; we'll just have to wait and see!
Still a worldbeater
Steel is still keeping up, and still advancing with research and
development at the steel production and bike production ends.
Its many attributes: fatigue strength, high modulus, high ultimate
strength and price to name but a few... really do make steel a
supermetal. It's just been around so long, people forget its
supermetal status; and the marketing guys find it much easier to
promote the other materials because of their relative newness to
the consumer. It's easier to blow smoke over something people know
less about...
Coming Up: Titanium - Exotica - TIG welding
UCI Classifications by Country
Here are the rankings by nation:
1. Switzerland 5,993 pts. (Rominger 2,386 pts.; Zulle 1,357 pts.;
Richard 964 pts.; Gianetti 669 pts.; Dufaux 615 pts.)
2. France 5,171 pts. (Jalabert 3,162 pts.; Virenque 947 pts.; De
las Cuevas 388 pts.; Madouas 353 pts.; Durand 319 pts.)
3. Spain 4,999 pts. (Indurain, Olano, Mauri, Escartin, Montoya -
individual tallies unavailable)
4. Italy 4,676 pts. (Chiappucci 1,276 pts.; F. Casagrande 1,066
pts.; Fondriest 874 pts.; Bugno 731 pts.; Bartoli 726 pts.)
5. Russia 3,580 pts. (Berzin 1,261 pts.; Ekimov 856 pts.; Tonkov
510 pts.; Bobrik 481 pts.; Konyshev 471 pts.)
Track Cycling Web Site
Just a short note to let everyone know that a brand-new track
cycling web site, "FixedGearFever," is now open, featuring FREE
classified ads for all your track cycling gear, and lots of
editorial content, too.
You'll find it at:
http://www.earthlink.net/~durer/fgf/