Should your next bike be steel?

Steel continues its long and storied journey but it’s no mere nostalgia trip, says Luke Friend

- Luke Friend

Its unique performance characteristics means steel can still meet the demands of a broad range of today’s road bike users like no other material can. By rights, aluminium and then carbon should have killed it off, but instead steel continues to evolve.

By remaining relevant, steel has seen continued innovation from dedicated designers and frame-builders. Whereas older steel frames were defined by slender, uniform tube shapes, today’s performance steel road bikes utilise developments in tubing and manufacturing processes. The result is a slew of modern frames with distinctly different shapes from designs past.

“Tubing material, shape and dimensions have a huge influence on the way the finished bike will ride,” says Dom Mason, who founded Mason Cycles in 2014. “We don’t use ‘off the shelf ’ tubesets; instead we take time to choose each tube individually, considering the influence it will have on ride quality and overall performance.”

Mason works closely with some of the world’s best tube makers, namely Reynolds, Columbus and Dedacciai. It allows the brand to use a blend of tubing types as well as custom shapes. For example, the Mason Resolution frame uses both Columbus Spirit and Life tubing that’s progressively butted rather than using traditional butting.

London brand Isen goes a step further with its R3 Disc, using a carbon-fibre seat tube and integrated seatpost with high-end steel tubing for the rest of the frame.