Aluminum Frame Quality Among Brands

it depends what you mean by quality it is such a vauge term it is almost meaningless without defintion.

You might be talking about frequency of failures which can a design issue rather than QC at the factory or do you mean finish of the welds or the durability of the paint. Perhaps you mean consistancy of the tube wall thickness.

Since I dont know what you mean it is hard to comment. In fact all the only answer you could get is opinion and first or second hand anecdote, to your question, not hard fact as the sample size we deal with is not big enough.

I am not trying to be a pedant here but the question itself is flawed and you will therefore get a flawed answer.


Base you choice of bike on these things. Does it fit, does it meet your needs, does it use proprietory comsumable parts that may or may not be available (like freehubs or other spares), is the bike easily serviced or does it require specialist tools......

Fenix wrote:

It's in nobodys interests to make a frame that fails.

No big name makers will have 'dodgy'' frames.

Read up on the model you want - it's always possible some have more flaws than others - but if you're aware you can make an informed decision.

Ignoring that 'Crackandfail' and 'Crackierre' and before that Commencal had exactly that?

Cannondale have just suffering a significant number of failures on their latest CX bike, so heard that just last week.

Point is they still get it wrong.

Review won't tell you if it's going to crack in six months or not!

That said, I agree it's pretty rare these days, and brand names are irrelevant really to quality as the cheaper frames from big name brands are often not as good as the entry level from lesser brands, for example teh Carrera hardtail frame is better than that on a Lardrock.

To be honest, if its hydroformed alu frames then its more than likely made by Giant for the other manufacturers anyway