Originally Posted by zonatandem
. . .Rode a Fuji Finest for several years; fully chromed frame with a very thin dark blue paintjob (other color choice was white) makng it look almost translucent and the lugs were full chrome. Nice stuff!
Nice stuff, indeed! I'm
still riding my '72 Fuji Finest (white: the "other" color)--double-butted chrome-moly.
Recently, I found a vintage Fuji Roubaix on eBay, and I don't know where it fits in the Fuji hierarchy. It has:
- lugged, quad-butted Ishiwata SI-45 "Feather" tubing,
- mostly 105 components (FD, RD, down-tube indexed shifters, crankset, pedals, headset, side-pulls with SLR aero levers, 1050 hubs, 6-cog 13-24 indexed cassette),
- Nitto stem and bars
- Sakae seat post
- Selle San Marco Lazer saddle
- Ukai 700Cx25 rims with bladed spokes
- internally-routed rear brake housing
- rounded, one-piece "Italian style" fork crown, not the older lugged crown.
I suspect it's from the late '80s: it's not listed in the 1986 Fuji catalog; it says "Made in Japan" under the seat-tube Ishiwata label, and about that time Fuji production was shifting to Taiwan. I don't know the time-line of the 105 group or Shimano 6-cog indexing, and since Fuji has changed hands several times, the serial number trail is cold. Can anyone help date this? I've read that "triple-" and "quad-butted" in that era were mostly marketing hype, but the Ishiwata tubing is the real steel deal:
very sweet ride!