Typical STW reply from Toys19 there. How long have you been biking now? Do you think if Brant and his design crew did make that mistake they would have been the first? There is a large and very well respected custom frame builder doing that to this day namely Litespeed so i am sure there are others. No offence meant Brant of course. Can you please tell me how this would not apply to steel and aluminium frames as i am no metallurgist

Excellent service from The Bike Chain (and Brant/Hotlines) sorting out my replacement without any fuss,
cheers all

Can you please tell me how this would not apply to steel and aluminium frames as i am no metallurgist

Me neither.

This is talking to Mark Lynskey a bit – Ti doesn’t like having too much heat put through it. Gussets just add heat and don’t always make things better.

With an alloy frame, the frame is heat treated after welding which gives it all a chance to normalise the stresses and make things nice.

With steel, well – steel is steel and different again.

We’re moving away from saddle gussetted frames on the 2011 models, thanks to the Fathead steel tubing we developed.

I’ve been thinking about this and I wonder there is a good reason why in Ti and steel gussets might do more harm than good. Stress is force over area, (ie it is independant of the material) so in an Aluminium alloy frame if you have a thick walled tube then adding a gusset might spread the stress through the cross sectional area. With Steel and Ti you can get away with much thinner wall sections to carry the same stress (globally) but locally a gusset might be worse as the wall section is so thin. But the point of a gusset is to reduce the stress concentrated at the joint, (in this case the head tube and down tube) so if applied correctly it makes sound engineering sense. Wherever there is a change in section there is a stress concentration, a bike frame is full of them…