I wondered about weight. Wouldn't the machining to create thin laminated tubing need good precision and probable significant expense. Before that 1890's time, were the bicycles mostly high wheels. The mainframe tube may have been fiveish feet long. Might have been quite an effort to weld up, deep hole drill and turn down that length of thin wall laminated tube.
Except for one offs, chances are volume production looked for some other source. There're records of damascus barrel production, I would think it would correlate closely to firearm manufacturing output for the time. Just thoughts.
