A simplified steel bicycle tube selection tool

Steel remains the most commonly used bicycle frame material in the world. While a large proportion of these are mass produced, a small but significant number of bicycles are produced by hand in small quantities by professional or amateur bicycle frame designers/builders. Frames are designed and fabricated using a range of available tubes and these can be mixed and matched according to the requirements of the client taking into account any joining or fabrication constraints. A range of accessible beam property calculators exist online that can be useful for frame designers/builders, however these do not allow the user to specify a variable (butted) cross section which exists in specific case of bicycle tubes, and the outputs of these tools can be difficult to interpret by non-engineers. Furthermore, it is not possible to compare multiple tubes at the same time using these tools. The purpose of this study was therefore to develop an accessible tool to allow frame designers/builders to improve the performance of their bicycles. This work was conceived as a work package in the steel bicycle project to raise awareness of engineering principles that relate to steel bicycle
frames and which aims to support frame builders in designing and fabricating better and safer products.