Originally Posted by
bulldog1935
You should be able to spread 126mm to 130mm without cold setting - that's 2mm each side.
Worked perfectly on my daughter's Team Fuji.
If you get it too narrow with 8 gears you may have a chain suck problem on the seat stay
753 is just alloyed for TiG welding
Dirty little secret: most frame builders cold set frames all the time. I had a frame painted by Ed Litton a few decades ago, who besides being a framebuilder and painter par excellence, has been the Bianchi authorized frame repair guy for a few decades. He delivered it to the shop I was working in. I told him I needed it spread from 120 to 126. He took the frame, clamped the bb in our shop vice, grabbed the stays, spread them, grabbed a spoke gauge with metric ruler, said "nailed it", removed it from the vice and handed it to me, and told me to put our dropout tool in and make sure they were parallel.
If the stays aren't dimpled, it's pretty much that easy, just sneak up on it. Ed's arms are well calibrated.