So the newest addition to my bike stable is a dedicated tri bike with a scandium frame; carbon stays and forks. The weather here has let up enough that I finally got my chance to give this bike a good test.
Scandium has such good ride characteristics. It is has the stiffness of any aluminum frame but, unlike regular aluminum, it is super smooth and eats up most road vibrations. I have to admit, I was skeptical about scandium at first; thinking it was nothing but a fancy way of marketing aluminum. After riding this material, however, I’m a convert. I rode a high end all carbon bike all summer which was great but there is just something about the feel of a metal ride.
With the exception of Titanium, I venture to say that I’ve ridden pretty much every material out there. IMO, carbon is SO over-rated (especially low end carbon).
K, going back out now to give my girl another spin around the city.
I own a scandium road bike and it is probably the best ride I got in my stable. I will be looking for a new dedicated tri bike. What manufacturers are making good tri bikes out of scandium?
One of the bikes in my stable is a Scattante SC-R (scandium frame w/ carbon seat stays). Honestly, when I saw it at Supergo for the price packaged with a DA10 group, I couldn’t pass it up. It was surprisingly stiff, light, and rode very smoothly. The cool thing about it is that it had minimal tube cross sections without the fancy shaping.
I own a scandium road bike and it is probably the best ride I got in my stable. I will be looking for a new dedicated tri bike. What manufacturers are making good tri bikes out of scandium?
Yaqui I think does
I own a scandium road bike and it is probably the best ride I got in my stable. I will be looking for a new dedicated tri bike. What manufacturers are making good tri bikes out of scandium?
My bike is a Merckx which probably has a less aggresive seat post angle than most tri bikes; I think the frame is more for TT. I use a fast forward seat post which probably isn’t optimal. With carbon in such great demand, I’m not aware of any companies other than Merckx that use scandium to a great extent.
It might even be lower. U was a materials engineer for an aluminum foundry and we measured alloys in the parts per million! I am not sure the make up of scandium based aluminum alloys but it probably does not take too much to effect the alloy phase.
Also, too much does not necessarily mean better. You want just enough to get the right phase conducive to strength and good weldability. Too much may cause embrittlement which leads to a bunch of issues.
“Scandium alloys are essentially identical in performance to other common aluminum alloys, but they are much stronger. This allows us to design tubesets that take advantage of this strength ,through tube dimensions and shaping, to influence ride characteristics and obtain lower weight.”
or…
Scandium doesn’t do much for a bike that has as it’s main design criteria aerodynamics, as the manipulation of tube profiles that is largely responsible for the “Scandium Ride” is absent from these designs…
as noted above, scanduim the trade-name is not the same as scanduim the material/element. these bikes are basically aluminum bikes.
the reason scandium ( trade-name ) bikes ride well is because they use less of it. the walls are thinner, so the frame ‘gives’ more in a minute sense. think of a thin-wall beer can, vs a thick-wall aluminum pipe of the same diameter. if you made a scandium ( trade-name ) frame with the same wall thickness and tube diameters as a non-scandium alloy aluminum frame it would ride exactly like the aluminum frame that it is.
