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Old 07-08-19, 08:14 PM
  #27  
Cycle Tourist
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Originally Posted by verktyg
DT Lugs? Please explain what you are referring to?

Lugs are the thin steel sleeves that the 3 main tubes are brazed into on a lugged frame bike.




On inexpensive bikes like your Stella, lugless construction was a cost savings method of assembling a frame.

I saw very few lugless French bike boom models. I don't recall ever seeing a frame failure on one of them but it was common on CHEAP American made brazed or welded lugless department store bikes.

You did a nice job of fixing it up. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.

BTW, my snobbish attitude towards cheap bikes comes from working on some of them during the bike boom days of the early 70's.

Those bikes usually had cheap components that barely worked when new, very cheap cables and housing that all needed replacement plus frequently they were poorly assembled at the factory in Europe.

The amount of time spent repairing and sometimes even reassembling those bikes to get them to work properly amounted to more labor costs than the bikes were worth and in the end, the owner still had a cheap bike!

We wouldn't let department store bikes into our shop for all of the above reasons plus the liability factor of having worked on a bike that was unsafe before it left the factory! KID KILLERS!

verktyg
It was a slip of the tongue. I meant bosses not lugs. This bike came with DT bosses for a nice set of levers. Granted the Simplex derailleurs were a joke. The rear ones actually work but I had better ones in the junk box so why not. Anyway the bike with the 105 crank is fairly light and doesn't handle like a gas pipe special. The nice paint on the old girl plus the bosses and the alloy wheels someone swapped out gave me the incentive to give up the $25. Most of the "new" parts were things I had taken off other projects except for the barends. I didn't see too many shift bosses on cheap bikes and everything is english threaded!! I was really surprised. The BB shell was 7.0 not 6.8 so I'm sure it's really a Stella but it doesn't handle like a cheapie. Maybe the French made better cheapies than we did. I got about $115 in it which is probably too much but it actually rides really nice and I probably won't lose money so WTH.🤓
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