LAS VEGAS -- A familiar old friend peeked out through the forest of carbon fiber at Interbike 2007 this year, making its presence known after years of neglect: steel is back.
While major manufacturers like Specialized and Giant proffered a deluge of sophisticated, high-tech carbon-fiber models, smaller boutique companies like Salsa Cycles and Swobo are busy bringing new steel models to the market -- and they're selling like hotcakes.
Steel's popularity "has gone up dramatically -- there's actually been a resurgence," says Jason Boucher, general manager at Minnesota-based Salsa Cycles.
Steel is one of cycling's oldest materials, but it has fallen out of favor in recent years. Until the '80s, almost all bike frames were made out of steel alloys, but now the bike industry favors materials like aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber. Only a small band of cycling purists have stuck with steel because of its smooth handling characteristics.
But now it's back. About half of Salsa's 11 models are steel -- up from around a quarter just a few years ago -- with two more steel models coming soon. Salsa's No. 1 selling frame model is steel: the El Mariachi, a thin-tubed mountain bike with a rigid fork.
Swobo, a popular cycle-clothing maker, started selling bicycles after Sky Yeager, designer of iconic bikes like Bianchi's Pista, joined Swobo as its managing director last year. Yeager quickly conjured up three steel and three aluminum bikes. She said the steel, fixed-gear model is already selling out.
"Steel is almost the perfect material for bikes," said Yeager. "Workability, longevity, ride quality: Steel is it."
Yeager said steel used to be the only material in the arena around 20 years ago when she first began designing bicycles. But production advances made aluminum cheaper, lighter and easier to manipulate. Aluminum became indispensable in the development of full-suspension mountain bikes.
Ironically, steel might be on its way out just as it enjoys a surge in popularity.
A combination of high steel prices and lack of demand from major bike manufacturers is creating problems sourcing steel bicycle tubing, said Yeager.
"What's scaring me is there are hardly any manufacturers of steel left," she said.
Yeager said another hurdle is that the pool of skilled builders is drying up.
"We've lost the people that know how to weld steel," she said.
On the other end of the spectrum are giants like Specialized and Cannondale, who have eschewed the simplicity of steel and are forging ahead into the realm of carbon fiber.
Increasingly, the use of exotic materials means that components and frames are becoming non-interchangeable.
New for 2008, Specialized released its Future Shock, a carbon-fiber suspension fork that's designed to be used only with its top-of-the-line carbon-fiber S-Works racing mountain bike frame. This means that no other fork will work with these frames, and vice versa. The manufacturer also uses a similarly integrated, rigid fork in its new S-Works triathlon and time-trial bike. Specialized claims more-responsive steering and weight loss from this system.
Another example can be seen in the company's new integrated crankset-and-bottom-bracket combination, which is very similar to Cannondale's proprietary HeadShock and Hollowgram Si integrated crankset, which have been around for years.
Specialized revealed that even more of this tight, proprietary integration between frames, forks and components would appear in the future. But it was tight-lipped about the details, only mentioning that the integration would move to all of the company's premier S-Works bikes before trickling down to less-expensive models.
