Otherwise they sell their raw steel to secondary producers, which will likely involve further transport to a factory where, for the purposes of bicycle manufacture, seamless steel tubing is produced. The raw materials have already potentially travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to the smelter to be turned into steel, but smelters, if they produce any products at all, tend to only make the big stuff - think girders and railway tracks. ![]() We’ve got steel now, right? Then let's make some bikes! Alas, not quite. Smelters intake ore from mines both domestically and overseas depending on their location and global production, and once it’s gone in the melting pot together there isn’t any way to know what has come from where It’s like making a cake from four international eggs and trying to work out which country the egg in your slice came from. It might look like rusty rocks, but this is where every steel bike starts its life (Image credit: Financial Times)Ĭonsumers nowadays like the ability to trace their consumables back to the source, but in the case of steel, and other metals, this isn’t really possible. To smelt enough steel for a single 1.5kg bike frame requires the same amount of energy as a standard UK household uses in a day. Adding carbon at this point produces steel, and other metals such as molybdenum are added to create specific alloys. The process has basically remained unchanged since the iron age, but has been significantly scaled up. This process, known as smelting in the case of most metals including steel, takes the ore or metallic concentrate (a powder that’s relatively high in metal content, more so than the rock it came from), and heats it up to the point the chemical bonds break down, separating iron from the waste, known as slag. The mining industry consumes roughly 10 per cent of global energy, and given the energy use within the sector it means four per cent of all the energy produced globally goes into crushing rocks, and once you get it out of the ground you have to turn it from an ore into a metal. Mining, as you might imagine, is relatively energy intensive. It was dug out of the ground in some of the largest mines in the world and placed into a train that’s 1.5 miles long for a journey across the desert to a smelter on the coast. The steel in your custom stainless frame or your mum’s old mountain bike began life as a rusty rock, more than likely in the Australian outback. The biggest producer of iron ore is Australia, followed by Brazil and China. To put that into context that's the same weight as two million aircraft carriers being dug out of the ground year in, year out. ![]() The numbers involved can easily make you lose your sense of scale in 2015 over two billion tonnes of iron ore was extracted from the earth. Steel represents 95 per cent of annual metal use globally, and given that the percentage of carbon in steel is a matter of a couple of per cent at most, we can use iron and steel synonymously when speaking in global terms. We’ll begin with how the best steel road bikes are made, as it is a good primer for the industry as a whole. Each step is 15-20 metres tall (Image credit: Wikipedia) How are steel bikes made? ![]() The size of some mines is hard to imagine.
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