>>2023940
>steel frame for under $3k
I should say so. Steve Rex, Mandaric, Rodriguez, Elephant all spring to mind as boutiquey builders with name-brand tubing who will do that for you.
>Would I be consumed with post-purchase rationalization if I fell for the steel meme?
I mean you could always shop around for a cheap used one, flog it for a while, and see how you like it. Your choices for nice MiUSA frames are basically steel or ti, if that matters to you--there are a few domestic shops doing carbon or aluminum, but not many, and the carbon in particular is quite expensive.

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>>2023942
I'm not hung up on what nationality makes it, it can be made by DPRK child soldiers or the finest craftsmen of Hamas or the Houthis if the product is up to snuff, but MIUSA is fine as long as it's not just riding on mindless jingoism which I worry that a lot of MIUSA product branding has been reduced to these days. I know rodriguez is fine, I don't mean them, I just mean as a general rule.

So you're saying that they're as comfy as a plush tire'd crabon bike with toobless even if I have to ride 100 PSI tires? I want to believe but it just doesn't sound scientifically plausible.

>>2023940
Steel is real and rim brakes are good enough but not all steel is equal. There's basic hiten steel and then there's exotic alloys of steels like Reynolds or Columbus steel. Now the material is one thing, design is another, which means geometry plays a big role in how real is that steel. Exotic steel is usually thin walled, butted, and hardened which gives it spring-like characteristics, making the bike feel alive, reactive, and dynamic.

You write like a faggot desu

>>2023950
>making the bike feel alive, reactive, and dynamic.
shut up faggot

>>2023962
It's not wrong but the same can be found with carbon, aluminum, and titanium anyways. It should be said, shit steel is not those qualities

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OP gobbles these down

>>2023950
for me its 4130 CrMo

>>2023940
I have a Gunnar (rip) Roadie, I like it a lot. I've never owned a real expensive carbon bike, but I raced on a caad12 for a little bit and then china carbon after that. I got a steel fork with my Gunnar and it helps dampen road buzz compared to the carbon forks I was riding on prior. Same wheels and tires between the bikes, the only thing that changed was the frameset. All steel isn't created equal, I have some 90s steel road bikes with unicrown forks and those things beat my hands up harder than anything I've ridden. A steel road bike with rim brakes that can fit 28 mm tires is all I'm really interested in owning (for road riding) from here until I stop riding bikes altogether.

My cromoly frame with dual-pivot calipers runs 28C and I think it is indeed a very nice ride. I have no idea how it would compare in feeling to your aero crabon though. My other bikes are all alu-alloy frames. I paid about a tenth of what OP is looking to drop, for the steel one second-hand.

I think you should get a nice but not stupidly expensive steel frame and decide for yourself how it feels to you.

That's about as helpful as I can be on the topic.

>>2023945
>So you're saying
not at all, that's where buying a cheap older high-end steel roadie and trying it out for yourself comes into the picture

>>2023940
Rim brakes are totally legit, lighter, less complexity, and allows for the frame to really extend compliance features (which if you’re looking for vintage steelisreal, is specifically what you want). Vintage steel road racing bikes are absolutely super-compliant, in my opinion, in a bad way, they’re noodley in a good way against road buzz sure, but they’re also noodley in a bad way when cornering or sprinting hard. Carbon wins. They have to isolate the flex characteristics, and to do that will steel they would need additive metal design and extreme tube shaping (which is also heavy). Carbon wins here, it can isolate flex characteristics of the whole frame while keeping strength with just a few grams of carbon layer, or just a different layering process

Look at titanium shaping if you want a glimpse of what the future of compliance focused steel might be (lots of expensive 3d printed parts, rare shaped tubes from a small handful of suppliers, gussets and bracing bars galore). Carbon is the smarter move

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>>2023989
I'm on rims with 23mm internal width and I'm happy with how these ride with 32mm tires. I'm willing to entertain the idea that a more noodly steel bike with rim brake fork and something like a HED ardennes plus with 700x28 tires (pic not related) might be adequately comfy but I'm not sure that getting a genuinely antique bike with 14mm internal width rims is going to give me a very good sense of what to expect on a better modern steel bike with rim brakes, or is it? If it is, then that would be a solid confirmation that I shouldn't go down this road at all.

I realize I could get an antique and tear the whole thing down and spread the dropouts and build up a whole new wheelset and so on just so I can try to apples to apples it but at that point my mild curiosity is not adequate to overcome my aversion to buying antiques and fucking around with them as a sort of test drive. I know what works for me now and that's modern wide tires and dick brakes. I can just ignore the weeb in my head telling me to buy new shit that looks like old shit (but is presumably better than one would expect, pic related).

>>2023996
>noodley in a bad way when cornering or sprinting hard.
I wonder if you might be overestimating my watts though, I'm no Chris Hoy. I did feel what I take to be a big change in flex when I went from metal to plastic wheels, at least when stomping up particularly steep hills and pulling up on the bars, but that applies to approximately 2% of my time in the saddle, on a good day. So unless it's incredibly obnoxious I could probably tolerate that if the overall experience is good.

Titanium is the kind of thing I might get for the lolz if I had room for at least 3 bikes but it has always given me a serial killer vibe for some reason. Not the warm fuzzies like other materials. So I wouldn't consider it for my primary main bike. I realize this is not rational at all but none of this is rational.

>>2023997
Just get an older nice bike and presume that a modern nice steel bike fits in the middle depending on what you get.
That build isn't going to be particularly stiff with the tange prestige frame, quill stem, and old school raked out front fork.
Admittedly it's probably fast and fun with those super blingy cranks and a 10 speed rear end.

Either way used nice rim brake bikes are cheap if you live in the right part of the world.
I buy nice 80's bikes for sub 100usd

>>2023940
Get an old (but good) steel bike and check it yourself. It shouldn't set you back that much and you can sell it in case it isn't for you. You can also upgrade many of the components for a more modern feel. Point in case, I upgraded ( haters will say downgraded) my steel road bike with modern aero drop bars.

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>>2023940
>the clickbait has gotten me thinking
Uhhhh
>name brand duende meme bike
>duende
Pic related

(It's the word for "elf" in Spanish, btw)

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>>2024067

>>2024070
that fork is going to make me throw up

>>2024081
Sounds like you just don't understand art, maaaan

>>2024083
sounds like a post from a modern "artist".
The paint is fine. Weird, but fine.
The fork looks like a bent leaf spring. It might match the frame if the tubes were twice the size.

>>2023940
post height and local craigslist

>>2024070
as far as retarded gravel forks go this isn't even so bad, try a fucking lauf fork or any of the ~50mm meme travel ones

Pegoretti are in the italian tradition of garish design like Colnago. You make it hideous to the point where it becomes sexy. It's like leopard print. That frame is gonna look good specced up with Campy Ekar (also hideous).

I love the riser headtube, it's like Big Mig's Pinarello.
Also those Pegs ride awesome. My neighbor has one and prefers it to his carbon LOOK and his Merckx.

>>2023997
>antique
This is the wrong word.
Antique refers to pre-modern bikes. Bicycles reached a relative end-state in the late 80s / early 90s. The steel bikes you'd be looking at are modern, to some people they aren't even classics but classic is the word you want.

Antique (or vintage) refers to 60s bikes and earlier with actually archaic technology.

Your klutzing about rim / tire size is ridiculous because you can run whatever wheels and tires you want and lots of classic road bikes have decent clearance. The notion that you'd have to spread the dropouts or build wheels for it is ridiculous. Many road frames are 130 and the rest you'd be looking at are 126 and easily accept a 130 wheel without cold setting.

Don't buy faux-vintage. Quill stems are fine but if you're dropping the coin on a new bike it's retarded.
What do you even want the bike for? If it's for serious riding, training, group rides, distance, ok, you have preformance concerns. Isn't it just a 'go out and thrash around for an hour' type of bike of a cafe cruiser though? Why obsess about 'comfort'? Get something cool. Buy something old, once expensive, and cool and overhaul it. If you're too lazy then just keep shitposting about how old bikes suck.

>>2024070
I know it's a gravel bike but that fork is mega fugly

>>2024104
I don't do "serious riding" or "training", think of me as basically the op of this thread >>1999701 except creepier and more antisocial, my weekday rides are about 20 miles and my weekend rides around 50. The reason I obsess over comfort is sometimes my rides are longer and usually past mile 60 or so, things start to get sore from all the cracks and bumps. Not always, but sometimes, it really depends on how aggressively I'm riding, and how tired I was at the start of the ride. But that's on 32mm tires. So I worry about what a 28mm tire would be like. I don't know if I mentioned this earlier but I'm not a spry young man like you kids. I require a degree of comfort or I become grumpy.

Granted this is probably going to be the bike I keep at the home of an elderly parent so I can ride when I'm there, and I don't really know what the riding is like around that place, other than the fact that the immediate surroundings are disgustingly flat and "bike friendly" which to me is code for unracer hell. I should really just borrow a shitter and get the lay of the land first. For all I know I'll fall in love with my fantasy window shopping bike that does not exist yet, and abandon crabon forever.

Thanks for the warning about quill stems, I assumed they were de rigueur for pseudo-old bikes but the idea of something so unconfigurable gives me hives, it's like buying an aero cockpit. GNU plus Bike would provide a degree of reassurance for a frame whose geometry is unfamiliar to me. I know I know, "just get a bike fit", I have a prejudice against those people since I blew a lot of money on one once and it didn't fix my problem. So the sizing and fitting is going to be a DIY job. That's one of the reasons why I'm not that interested in custom geo, I believe that stuff is just snake oil. Thank you for reading my blog.

>>2024110
Not him but vintage road bikes are pretty much at a free fall cost right now , so if you find one that looks nice, post it and we can give a quick run down.

>>2023940
>How much truth do you think there is to these memes that say that high end steel isn't like the cheap shit I think of when I think of steel?
100%, cheap shit will never be anything like expensive shit. Doesn't matter what you're purchasing.
>Would I be consumed with post-purchase rationalization if I fell for the steel meme?
Probably not.
>Are steel bikes and rim brakes the cast iron of bikes?
No. Steel material science has advanced dramatically over the last few decades, and that has definitely worked its way to the high end bike world. Rim brakes can still send you flying over your handlebars with one strong finger.
>Opinionated attention whores who need to have something to argue about at all times so they pick the most argumentative pointless crap that has a grain of truth that gets overemphasized at the expense of the big picture?
That's just idiots on the Internet, doesn't matter what subject you're speaking about
>Or is there something to this memery?
Yeah, there's something to steel bikes. They been around for over 100 years and they're not going away anytime soon. There are so many super steels that have never even been made into bike tubing, there's a lot to experiment with in the future and a lot of interesting advancements to come for sure.

you just know op has been non-stop seething and bickering against steel bikes on /n/

Steel is real slow

The ideal bike is aluminum frame, steel fork. The thing you really need is rim brakes. Until you understand what a rim brake fork feels like don't give up on aluminum.

Modern bikes ride like shit because the disc requires insanely overbuilt forks, which are shit. Then they pad that shit with fat slow tires to compensate

It's rare to find aluminum frame with steel fork but they exist.. Best combination

>>2024245
Aluminum sucks I'm trying to find an alloy megapro and they are all cracked

>>2024245
what steel bikes have you owned lad
just a bunch of shitters right?

>>2024250
Even if you find one that isn't cracked and buy it, it will crack on you at some point
Because aluminum is shit

>>2024245
>Steel is real slow
>The ideal is [...] steel fork
Steel forks are the number one contributor of weight for a steel frameset. The main triangle of a steel frame is only marginally heavier than an aluminum frame.

>>2024252
Nope I've owned classic 531 and Tange bikes. I've owned modern steel Soma crosscheck.

They're heavy as balls and ALL of the comfort comes from the flexible steel forks - which are only flexible when they are RIM and (forgot to mention) 1" steerer.

Tom Ritchey himself says 1" and run 3 is the key to a comfortable bike, but you retards want thick overbuilt garbage meant for DH mtb

>>2024258
Bad day huh.

>>2024258
>Tom Ritchey himself says 1"
steerer, ok
>and run 3
3 what?
google gives me nothing

>>2024258
>I've owned classic 531
many shitters, plaingauge 531 is not particuraly nice and i bet unrestored
>and Tange bikes
doesn't really mean anything, plenty of quite basic and overbuilt tange frames
>I've owned modern steel Soma crosscheck.
not even a bike at all, wonder if you're lying bud

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>>2024272
I think he left out a : as in
>Tom Ritchey himself says 1" and run :3 is the key to a comfortable bike
which is to say
>Tom... says that 'to implement a 1 inch and then run (bottom smiley) is the key to a comfortable bike
which is to say that Tom Ritchey is bottombrained

How tall are Tom’s headtubes, huh
#slammedgang

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>>2024258
I'm with you on wanting a compliant fork, but how much compliance do you really get from a steerer tube as opposed to the fork blades ? Just fucking think about it for one second.
Brandt / Ritchey shilling 1" was probably more about aesthetics.

Also these are rich guys who are designing their own custom bikes to ride. You can have autistic preferences, but if you're a poorfag scrapping the barrel of the used market then it's better to not have hyper specific preferences for uncommon tech, because all that means is that you're going to miss out on most nice stuff that's actually available to you.

Brandt and Ritchey both fully embraced threadless, and how many fucking 1" threadless steel forks are there? It's incredibly rare.

>>2024258
You're talking out of your ass with your stupid ass anecdotes.

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so, steel bikes are just the fountain pens of bikes, right? bored upper middle class people intentionally making life unnecessarily complicated, ostensibly in pursuit of a very subtle, mostly subjective user experience improvement as long as your riding habits conform to a highly contrived notion of "proper road riding", but actually because they are simply bored of being surrounded by modern shit that actually works and is easy to use?

>>2026436
It's actually a false dichotomy, and a us vs them argument which doesn't exist.
Most people who ride/appreciate high spec steel also ride/appreciate modern carbon/aluminium, and especially will see that is where the best value exists at the entry level, and obviously where the highest performance is.

As for nice classic bikes being cheap and good and cool, well, they are.

>>2026436
>as long as your riding habits conform to a highly contrived notion of "proper road riding"
I don't really see why / how you'd tangle that up in it either.

>actually because they are simply bored of being surrounded by modern shit that actually works and is easy to use?
This notion also, that modern stuff 'just works' is ridiculous, all different kinds of bikes have their own unique frustrations and headaches.

I think what you're actually annoyed by is people having lengthy opinions, those opinions and tastes are ridiculous sure, but they're probably from people who know a lot more than you do, and you've fucking come to a place for ridiculous tastes and opinions. It's like going on an audiophile forum and complaining that people are autistic, yes it's stupid, also fuck off.

>>2026438
>>2026437
wisdom

>>2026436
I pity the fool

>>2026438
>I don't really see why / how you'd tangle that up in it either.
"You don't need 28mm/32mm tires, the pros got by just fine on 19mm, personally I find 23mm too plush"

These were the same hipsters running around 10 years ago saying you were a larping chump if you weren't riding >28mm because jobst brandt said blah blah blah. Now they sneer with disdain at anyone riding 32mm and "that's not even for roads you moron", now they think playing with inner tubes and frame pumps by the roadside every 500 miles is a necessary part of the "cycling experience" (oh wait that doesn't happen because if it does you're stupid and you ride wrong)

>This notion also, that modern stuff 'just works' is ridiculous
Are you going to tell me with a straight face that fiddling with your brake calipers every week due to pad wear and accounting with cable housing stretch with a fourth hand tool is better than simply swapping out some sintered pads once or twice a year and bleeding your system once every 3-5 years at best? That apprenticing with a shop journeyman to learn the proper (subjective, emotionally modulated) wrist tightness of the preload on your ball bearing cups so the hubs neither seize nor destroy the races is better than just tapping out the old with a slide hammer and pressing in the new with a bearing press?

Don't get me wrong I love my fountain pens and raspberry pis and freehand sharpening, I can debate about chromium oxide vs cubic boron nitride and carbide sizes of 440c vs aogami super all day but it's a hobby, I do these things to waste time. Not because I think they're better. As long as you don't think doing everything the stupid way is actually *better* then we're good

>>2026442
filtered

>>2023940
I have a steel bike with discs and I wish it had rims. I could possibly convert it but I'm already paying the penalty of a reinforced fork and back end so I may as well keep the discs.

My last shithouse bike had rim brakes and as long as I kept them adjusted every now and then they were fine although I will say I'm not huge on brakes, I don't like wasting my energy, and rarely bike in the rain

>>2024245
I have an alu framed carbon forked (no brake) track bike and that thing fucking hauls ass, it's night and day from my other brakeless fixed gear bike (Surly Steamroller) that is kitted out with nice tires

>>2026460
Cable discs aren't real discs

>>2026473
kek it's a mix, it's Juin Tech's. meant to be the best of cable-hydro brakes. But yes, give me shitty rim brakes over the best cable brakes ever made

>>2026475
>cable-hydro brakes.
takes all the worst traits of cable and hydro and disc with none of the good aspects, and puts them together in one nightmare system

>>2023940
Lets see your current performance bikes.

>>2026442
wew the inferiority complex on you lad

>>2026442
anon disc brakes didn't become standard because they're easier to work on, it's because they preform better

cartridge bearings didn't become standard because they're easier to work on either, but because they're cheaper to manufacture.

amongst actual mechanics opinions are pretty split about which systems (and old vs new stuff generally) are better to maintain/ service and each have their drawbacks and advantages.

This idea that rim brakes or cup and cones are inherently hard to service is ridiculous, there's just a skill curve. Your impulse to want things to be easy for you, a noob, right away, is something you should try to flush, hardly any real skills are easy with fuck all experience.
Truing a wheel is also 'hard' until you're good at doing it then it's easy.

But i respect you wanting to work on your bike yourself, as a noob. This is a good attitude. Bike tech definitely shouldn't lock that out with meme technology and tool requirements. Internal cable routing for example is something which is really unfriendly to noobs.

>>2026442
>fiddling with your brake calipers every week due to pad wear
mini-vs are the only system that commonly requires re-adjustment within the entire life of the pad.

>accounting with cable housing stretch
Cable housing stretch is not real, it's actually just housing bedding into its stops/ferrules, and is largely irrelevant if you install it carefully. It's really more of a thing for shift cables anyway because indexing is more precise.

If you just mean tightening the brake cable as the pad wears, most rim brake systems have a barrel adjuster which is enough for the entire life of the pad.

>with a fourth hand tool
I don't even have a third hand tool, when installing a cable, what i do is close the caliper with an Irwin quick grip clamp, pull the cable taunt, then back it off a few mm. Learning to guess how far you back it off takes experience. The clamp isn't even necessary, you can do all that with two hands, it just makes it easier.

>proper tightness of the preload on your ball bearing cups
There are a few tricks to this. Get a small vice and put the locknut on the other side in it, then you can make small adjustments and you won't be just yoyoing back and forth with trial and error. Also realize, when the locknut is tightish, you can chose to either back the cone against the locknut to tighten it (which will make the bearing looser) or you can tighten the locknut against the cone (which will make the bearing tighter). That allows fine adjustment when you have something which feels close.
The correct tighteness for hubs is 'tiny bit of play', it's not complicated. That tiny bit of play tightens out in the skewer.

All that stuff is easy once you get the hang of it, that just takes some experience. Seeing as the vast majority of cyclists will never overhaul a bearing or even adjust their brakes, i don't see why systems should be designed to be as idiot proof as possible.

and i would really not trust an idiot to knock cartridge bearings out and press new ones in, especially not with cheap tools. That's easy to fuck up and damage stuff.

Disc brakes, fuck, there are a plethora of extremely frustrating issues you can run into with those.

>>2026482
Cartridge bearings are cheaper to own, since you can ride them until they're shrieking and the worst that can happen is you made a $30 disposable part even more impossible to repack if you're one of those people who likes to restore cartridge bearings. Legacy bearings require you to toss the entire hub if you lost track of mileage and/or didn't tear apart your bike every 2500 miles to replace the grease 'just in case'. The entire user experience of legacy hubs consists of worrying that you might be permanently destroying it because you felt like riding that day instead of tinkering, the exact opposite of #justride.

The rest of your argument is "it's better because there's a barrier to entry" which is essentially what I was saying. It's a hobby. I like hobbies too but sometimes (actually, most of the time) I want to Just Ride(tm).

>>2026493
you're overstating the importance of having good bearings
even if your cup/cone bearings are badly pitted it will still spin ok with fresh grease and balls (or even without them), and you can still 'just ride'

the chance of a wheel dying for other reasons are higher than a hub wearing out, and hub services are usually done -never-. Once a year is conscientious.

The reality is that actually decent wheels are new or low mileage and either system is absolutely fine.

>"it's better because there's a barrier to entry"
you're the one trying to say shit is better. The lady doth protest too much.

>>2026493
>I like hobbies too but sometimes (actually, most of the time) I want to Just Ride(tm).
I don't know why you care how easy they are to work on then, just pay someone

>>2026493
also m8 the proper tools required to pull cartridge bearings without a risk of damaging the hub shell are often pretty fucking expensive so now we're talking about making your own tools or paying a shop, and shops don't all even have all those tools.
They are absolutely not all designed to be easy to remove, infact some are designed to not be removed.

It's not as straightforward as you say.

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>>2026495
>just pay someone
But then I have to shop around for a shop that straddles that fine line between caring so little they fuck something up and make a mistake that sends you to the hospital, vs cares so much you have to do a day or two of surveillance on them and maybe send out a few phishing emails and infiltrate their systems until you have enough to build a shop owner psych profile so when you walk in you have a prepared question that you can ask in just the right way that acknowledges their unique fears, wants, hopes, needs, and struggles, or you get preemptively banished for "asking it wrong" >>2024599. And even then you have to wait a few days and you're not riding while they wait for rossignol group's assistant vice president of sales north america to google translate the question and get back to them with pricing on DHL shipping of their proprietary $75 copy of a $15 part because if they don't do it that way they are no longer an authorized dealer, and all that time you're not riding, you're just rotting your brain on of 4chan

Or, you just buy multiple bikes so you can #justride in the meantime, and although I do own multiple bikes, once again you're saying "actually, it's ok riding a bike is gatekept"

And to be clear, I am not even sure if I disagree with this sentiment, there's pros and cons to gatekeeping, but I think we've gone off the rails somewhat with the bearings discussion, all I'm saying is, it's weird how "current thing" was bad until it was no longer "current thing" but "cool retro thing" that is beloved, by the same crowd, for the same reason it used to be derided. We saw this with quartz watches too, now that apple watches took over boardrooms suddenly mechanical movements are for low information losers and real watch nerds appreciate the "craftsmanship of quartz" and actually my 9F GS is just as good as a journe elegante! If you disagree it means you're a clueless lolex fanboi and you enjoy getting findommed by your AD

>>2026442
this post is really tripping my personal style filters, along with the odd animosity against a very specific group that I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered. there was a period when I was pretty sure that a bunch of the racer/unracer discourse on here was driven by one guy posting bait on both "sides" (sometimes with bizarrely specific, seemingly unrelated affiliations) and this post really sounds like that.

>>2026461
>>2026475
yeah I demoed a few new road bikes and eventually bought a supersix evo after riding old shitters (or old superbikes, like pre-carbon, but the point is: old) thinking I might as well try disc and big meh desu, if I could save $400 and some weight by going to rim I absolutely would. on the other hand 50mm carbon rims do feel pretty fuckin fast and I don't know how well the various attempts to make them work with rim braking actually ever worked.

>>2026512
"feels fast" and "is fast" are not necessarily the same thing though, a lot of that is just how well high PSI transmits road vibrations compared to wider newer tires

>>2026510
I've been accused of samfriending my own posts on more than one occasion, you should consider the possibility that the supposedly nonexistent subcultures in cycling might actually exist

>>2026498
mate it's just a bike
you need to chill out honestly, almost any shop will do a specific job like service a bearing or your brakes for you and it's not hard to ask them

>>2026515
right right but what I'm saying is the new-school 50mm deep rims with 28mm gp all seasons or whatever feel faster than the old-school box-sections with 25mm gatorskins
>>2026516
i'm not saying that nobody has ever held the package of opinions you're presenting as some kind of insufferable ubiquitous presence in bike discourse, to be clear, I am merely questioning whether _enough_ people hold those opinions that it makes sense to treat it as a subculture instead of "these two really annoying guys on bikeforums" or whatever.
>>2026540
dnt like paypigging, me

>>2026545
I think it's more the need that some people have to be doing it 'the right way' and so really anything which might contradict this becomes offensive.

If you're in the game long enough you realize that different contradictory ethoses tend to all have something to be said for them and add to the fabric of bicycle life. I know a guy who commutes 10km on a bmx and hearing him justify it is hilarious, i'm less interested in how he's 'wrong' than how he's cool.

>>2026549
Dude must have be good at standing up hills, and pedaling with a short leg extension.
man alive.
Keeps you paying attention too since the bmx I had was twitchy on descents.
>>2026545
I am planing right now(if you know, you know).

>>2026553
yeah handling on a bmx is wild
think you get used to it though

fucking cranking out miles and there are some hills is just like wtf

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>>2023940
Steel quality only affects its strength, which means you can use less of it, making it lighter.
You can make bikes out of the basic pig iron 4130 and the most boutique high grade steel money can buy that will have the same ride characteristics, the cheap one will just weigh more.
Also just being steel doesn't guarantee the bike will ride well, I've had steel frames that were completely rigid garbage with no give. And price has nothing to do with it, one of my favorite riding frames is considered a budget, bottom shelf production.
And since nobody measures frame compliance in any objective way and paid reviewers will never EVER mention comfort in relation to the frame, your only way is to buy one and test for yourself. I would look for smaller manufacturers that specifically mention something like "smooth ride quality that steel is known for" when describing the bike, because at least then you can hope the designer gave it some thought when building the frame.

>>2026549
yeah this is a solid and sensible theory of cycling aesthetics
>>2026553
planing my way to ur moms house

>>2026748
this picture sponsored by lyme disease

>>2023940
what YouTube channels are good for this sort of thing?

>>2028597
Many of the "alt"bike channels talk abut it sometimes.
Here is a video I remember which was a pretty logical take
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kW2cfCrDb8

As the other anon said, the best you can do is read what the marketing page says for a bike and hope they are being truthful

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Ok, so I found someone (editor's note: corporations are people) selling a restored classic eye-talian bike made by a member of the old frame building nobility, with the thin tubes and external cables that you ladies seem to be "ga-ga" over, and I finger fucked it for a while, and you know what. I think that cured me of my delusions. It was beautiful to look at but it was pig heavy, the wheels (light and elegant as they were) were basically pizza cutter medieval torture devices with absolutely no clearance for anything bigger than 700xUnnecessarySuffering, and the whole thing looked like it had not just reached a dead end of technological advancement but had slammed into "the wall" as is the tendency of women of cis experience, and boeing death machines.

I shall now be pursuing my n+1 in the form of another dickbreak bike, but I'll find some characteristic that will be different for the sake of being different thereby making it compulsory that I spend my next tax refund or escrow overpayment check on it instead of doing something socially responsible with it.

Rim brake forks are way less stiff than disc. They greatly improve the feel of the ride. Cope all you want

>>2029480
the tire clearance thing is definitely valid, although the rim forks are necessarily more compliant than disk since the disc fork must be overbuilt to not bend it with the braking power.
there are steel road frames with wide tire clearance out there, but not at the racing level. a lot of touring frames had canti brakes and wide frame clearance. a lot of the Japanese brands made "sport tourer" frames even if they didn't call them that, which could have wide clearance. I have one where the catalog listing bills it as an entry level race ready bike, it even has a pic of swim/run/bike on one decal because apparently you could enter a triathlon with lugged steel and it wouldn't be considered odd in the mid 80s. but I run 32 mm tires AND full fenders on this bike. it has "good" cromo and when I stripped it down it felt surprisingly light in my hand but I suppose that's relative. but when you bought the more "pro" and team versions of this bike, the clearance disappears and you're forced to run 25s or less as you went up the product line.

>>2024258
>Tom Ritchey himself says 1" and run 3 is the key to a comfortable bike
still no answer to what 3 means here?

>>2029483
A tire with 5mm of compliance translates to less stiffness than a fork with 3mm, and said tire will be more puncture resistant and have better traction

>>2029510
Wider tires come with it's own set of drawbacks though

>>2029511
but meta says it's faster, and everyone has a glass crotch in 2025 so they NEED 40mm racing tires

>>2029515
I forgot being strong was politically incorrect in 2025

>>2029511
The only drawback is that they are heavier, but apparently riding heavier tires makes you weaker which is "woke"? Apparently the andrew tate crowd found cycling, it was inevitable I guess

>>2029522
>>2029520
>incelposting

OP, you're missing so much background information that it's useless to worry about frame materials. Try some test rides on different frame geometries, and try riding with actual performance road hill climb wheels, vs full aero wheels, especially if your legs have the watts for the latter to matter.

And basic things like compliance in your fork vs compliance in your tires, and the rotational torque of disc brakes aren't exactly hard concepts.

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An observation: if you look in the right places, there is a surfeit of god tier steelisreal in museum-grade condition with period-correct campy and stuff. But! Of course there's a but. But the period correct builds have, like, 13-23 cassettes and 180mm cranks in addition to the medieval torture device wheels and saddle supported by a fist full of steel. And of course "bro just hire a boomer to forge you some new cranks", but the point is, there's no such thing as a gift horse in the mouth.

Speaking of a fist full of steel, here is some great, classic music from back when music was music, politics was politics, and we didn't have to listen to these woke hollywood "artists" trying to shove their politics down our throat's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZDvZmvhik

>>2029480
You type like a total cuck, so I'm not the slightest bit upset that you got filtered by vintage features. Enjoy your internally routed dildo, I guess.