Sometime shortly after I built my first few bicycle frames in 1982, my uncle gave me his copy of this classic tome. It's been updated and "modernized" several times since this 1950 edition, but this is the one that gets prime real estate on my bookshelf. I've just been dogged by steel my entire life. You can't spend twelve years in Pittsburgh and not have it in your blood. When I was in college, we used to spend Saturday nights hanging out on the periphery of the Jones and Laughlin steel mill just to feel the earth move under our feet. That usually happened right after the sky turned a brilliant reddish orange amid much belching of smoke and ash.

I was thinking about how much easier it was to get started in the frame building business when I had the idea for Terry Precision Cycling in 1985. There was an abundance of how to books about building your own bicycle frame. Tubing, lugs, drop-outs and braze-on bits were just as accessible. But, most important, steel was real. Titanium and aluminum were just beginning to falter their way into the market and most of us regarded anything non-ferrous as some concoction out of left field. Carbon fiber? No one was even thinking about it as a material for bicycle frames.

So it's with much regret that I see this beloved material now only playing at the fringes -- meaning you can find it readily on either end of the price range, but rarely in the center. I can understand why small companies like Terry can't move an overseas manufacturer to get out of the rut and work with different materials, but I don't understand why larger companies aren't embracing the heritage of the industry with a material that can hold its own with the best of them. Are they like GM ("By God, they'll buy what we build.") or are we consumers just succumbing to marketing hype? Maybe a little of both.

I'm going back to my roots. Isis Pro and Isis Sport are now built of very lightweight, incredibly responsive and smooth as silk steel. And they're built here in the States . Fast Woman, also made of steel, will be coming home from a boutique builder in Japan later this year to join its sisters in the same Wisconsin factory. Welcome back everybody!

Richard Schwinn and I got together to talk about steel recently. You can hear our discussion on t-chatter.

Moral of the story: You can take the girl out of Pittsburgh, but you can't take Pittsburgh out of the girl.

Tailwinds,
Georgena
talktous@terrybicycles.com
www.terrybicycles.com