Yesterday I raced a steel bike over a mixed-terrain course, half dirt and half asphalt. There were checkpoints where we got our maps signed and it was fun. I like that steel bike and I like working on it. But it's just a bike, and my feelings about it and other bikes are separate from what is good and bad, right and wrong, better or worse; they are just my feelings.
Bikes are good. There are great bikes made from carbon fiber. I wear nitrile gloves when I work with toxic substances and greasy / dirty parts, mostly to protect me from toxins, make it easier to clean up and so my skin doesn't crack and peel from the cleaning process. I like riding bikes and working on bikes. I don't invest a lot of feelings in bikes, because bikes are inanimate objects.
I don't think the use of carbon fiber for building bikes is some bellwether of society's ailments or moral failings. Carbon fiber is light, strong, durable and can be built into a great bike. It depends on the people designing and engineering and building the bikes that use it. It's just a material with certain properties that are either suitable to the task, or not. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad. Just because steel's old doesn't mean it's good.
I am a bike rider. I am real. My bikes are real. At the moment they are all either aluminum or steel or titanium, but there are some carbon fiber forks in there. I don't have any bad bikes at the moment, but the one that bothers me the most is mostly wrong in the geometry department, I think. It's made out of titanium. What's wrong with it can be described in engineering terms. It is not bad, or less real.
I'm no physicist, but I think that if you do your research, you'll find that steel contains carbon. Carbon fiber is elemental. The epoxies that are used to bind it together are organically sourced from the earth, just as the materials for steel are from the earth. Steel degrades when exposed to the elements, and I think, so do the various epoxies used for carbon fiber construction. Carbon fiber itself isn't going anywhere.
I like classic lightweight bikes, not because they are more real or better or somehow more spiritually significant. They remind me of a time when people rode bikes during my youth, and in the past times that I have read about. I like to see how engineers and designers approached the creation of my favorite mechanism, in the past, and I like to still get some use out of bikes that would otherwise be antiques. I like to talk with other people about these bikes, their histories, uses, races and construction. If you collapse time, it's interesting to see how basically the same people with the same needs of a utilitarian object have approached its design and construction given the technology and ideas available to them. The bicycle is a good model for that kind of thinking. I really like bicycle racing, so my appreciation of old racing bicycles is wrapped up with my appreciation for old bicycle racers, races and the stories wrapped around them. Someday we'll be talking about bikes made in 2009 in the past tense, and some of us will remember them fondly and will still be riding them.
This thread really bothers me. If you start getting too sentimental, go ride. Don't impose subjective emotional qualities on this community, or things outside this community, please. Bikes are good, bike riding is good, let's keep it at that. Feelings are another matter and we don't need to share them to appreciate classic lightweight bikes. There is no pledge of allegiance for bicyclists, except maybe that bicycles are good.
Morgan Fletcher, possibly the youngest curmudgeon here at 40 Oakland, CA USA