The UK’s Starling Cycles has long been a steadfast proponent of heavy steel bikes. By replacing the downtube with a solid steel I-beam, Starling believes they’ve created a better-riding, better-feeling bike with the all-new Girder. Take a closer look here…
Everyone knows steel bikes are big, klunky, and heavy, but what if adding even more weight was the secret to a smoother, more progressive ride? Starling Cycles in the UK has been suspicious of the weight-weenie industrial complex for years now, and they decided it was time to challenge the idea of what a mountain bike should look like. The new Starling Cycles Girder uses a solid steel I-beam as a downtube, resulting in a substantially more stable, planted ride quality.
“A solid steel tube would be an easier solution for manufacture,” Joe McEwan (Starling’s Founder) concedes, “But it would result in a much stiffer frame, and as we know, ride feel is super important to us. The I-beam, even though it contains dramatically more material, actually gives us a torsional stiffness much closer to our current bike than a solid tube would.”
According to Starling, the extra weight of the Girder allows the rider to trust the bike to hold its line, even when unweighted. Starling describes lightweight bikes as pinballs, bouncing through the chaos, while a heavy bike resists chaos and maintains inertia. You’re probably wondering why Starling didn’t add all the extra weight around the bottom bracket, as that’s what the industry says works best. Well, Starling says you’ve already got the rider’s weight there, so it’s best to spread it out.
“In an ideal world,” he admits, “You’d put the weight at the ends of two long rods to maximise the rotational inertia of the bike, resisting suspension movement and keeping everything composed. But that’s just not practical. Maybe that’s something for an April Fools project one day.”
The Girder uses a 203 × 102mm structural steel I-beam (hot-rolled, S275) downtube, adding an additional 15 pounds (7 kilograms) to the standard Murmur frame. It has four bottle bosses and uses Starling’s IBEEM Technology, which stands for “I-beam Enhanced Engineering to the MAX.” It encompasses the I-beam downtube geometry, the multi-boss ballast integration system, and the carbonated mass-damper water delivery interface (bottle cage, two of them, standard 64mm thread).
Although the Girder isn’t for sale, Joe explains that this silly project might hold some truth. “We have long been cynical of the weight obsession,” he says. “It just doesn’t make scientific sense. The impact isn’t as big as marketing would like you to think. The Girder is the logical conclusion of that argument, taken to its most ridiculous extreme. Which, it turns out, isn’t that ridiculous.”
Learn more at StarlingCycles.com.
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