Butted tubing
• Bike tubing, whatever metal it’s made from, is usually butted. This means tube walls are thicker at the ends of the tubes – where there’s more stress and you need more material for the joints to other tubes – and thinner in the middle to save weight. Single-butted tubes are thicker at one end (for example, at the bottom-bracket junction), double-butted tubes are thicker at both ends and triple butting further reduces the thickness in the middle of the tube.
Hydroformed
• Butting is only part of the story and you’ll often see premium alloy frames described as “hydroformed”. This means the tubes have been shaped by using high-pressure fluid to form them to fit a certain mould.
Lugged frames
• Lugged construction is a method of…
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Cycling Plus (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2024