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failure: despite recent advances, carbon still is.
    4. Steel is also easily repairable: aluminium, carbon and titanium are not. In fact, a small crack in the chain stay on a carbon frame often means the whole frame is destined for the bin. Crucially, steel can be repaired anywhere in the world by a man with a blowtorch and a welding rod. I know this, because I bent a steel bike in northern India, when I was riding around the world. I was slipstreaming a tractor on the Grand Trunk Road near Amritsar. We were going downhill at a lick when I rode into a pothole the size of a hot tub. There was no time to react. I had what American mountain bikers call a ‘yard sale’. The bike, panniers, sunglasses, water bottles, tent, pump, map and I were strewn across the tarmac. I lost a lot of skin but the bike took the brunt of it: the top tube and the down tube were both bent, leaving the front wheel shunted backwards, rubbing against the underside of the down tube. I wondered if my round-the-world ride was over.
    It took me an afternoon to find the best mechanic, or ‘top foreman’ as the locals called him, in Amritsar. Expertly, he removed the handlebars, the stem, the forks and the stressed headset from the head tube, while attendants handed him tools as a nurse attends a surgeon. Then he shoved a metal spike through the head tube and literally bashed the tubes straight again. It was terrifying to watch. Thirty minutes later, he’d reassembled the bike. The job cost me 100 rupees (about $2.25) and a packet of smokes. I still had 7,500 miles to go to reach home. The two bent tubes had to be welded again in Gilgit, Tashkent and then Meshad, in Iran, but I did get home, on the same bike. The bare frame, still bearing the wounds, is on the wall in my shed.
    For years after my return, I was reluctant to take the frame back to the frame-builder, Roberts Cycles. The marks left by the Iranian welder were heinous. When I eventually did go back, I explained to Chas Roberts what had happened. He was delighted. He thrust me into the retail part of the shop where two men were about to wheel away their brand-new expedition touring bikes — one to cross America, the other to circumnavigate Australia. ‘Here,’ Chas said, ‘listen to Rob’s story. This is why you’ve bought steel frames.’
    I have no immediate plans to head off on a trans-continental journey on my dream bike, and, anyway, it’s not going to be a touring bike. One day, though, I plan to do some ‘credit card touring’ on it — that’s touring with no luggage except for a wallet. I hope to be off the map on it. I’ll be in a town on a former slave-trading route at the foot of a great mountain range having the frame straightened by a bald welder with one eye, as children skip about shrieking, ‘Give one pen!’ The frame has to be steel.
    We know more about steel than any other material used to build bikes. This alloy of iron and small quantities of other chemicals has been a building block of post-industrial civilization. Today, 95 per cent of all bikes are still made from steel. Most of these are made in China and India from ‘mild steel’, the cheapest, heaviest form of the alloy. If you’ve ever jumped on a bike in Asia and wondered if someone’s tied a baby elephant to the back, you’ve ridden a mild steel frame. They are very heavy.
    Most of the off-the-rack bikes for sale in western countries are made from lighter, low-carbon steel, generically known as ‘hi-tensile’, or else they’re made from aluminium. ‘Hi-ten’ steel is still relatively inexpensive to produce, is durable, but is stronger than mild steel so less of it is needed to make a bicycle.
    At the top of the pile are many high-quality, low-alloy steels.All quality steel bikes are made from these senior-grade, light and tremendously strong iron alloys. There are several noted marques producing steel