Originally Posted by
63rickert
It's my experience that pretty much every vintage steel frame is bent. They are fairly large and lightweight tubular structures that are used very hard. By the time they are thirty or forty years old they aren't that straight. If you do something crazy like riding them instead of looking at them they will get progressively less and less straight. Every time I have a frame aligned it rides a great deal better than it did before. Aligned as in on a frame table by a framebuilder. Or you can straighten them to 'good enough', as in good enough that the gears shift, the chain doesn't fly off, and it doesn't pull too hard to the side. Or you can ride them as is and then discuss the fine points of frame geometry.
It's just like tuning a piano. You keep doing it. A good pianist can play an out of tune piano and make great music. For anyone who uses the piano hard the instrument is noticeably further from tuning at the end of the performance than at the beginning. So you call the piano tuner back. Or the instrument slides downhill to junk.
63, where do you take frames to be aligned and get good results, in your area? I can't think of too many Michigan shops I would trust to do it correctly and whom are still in the game. I had a Trek aligned once by Ron Boi, and the improvement was magical. We used to have Mike Nobilette here in Ann Arbor, but that was >25 years ago. My local good shop went out of business less than a year ago. but they also were not 100%. I don't really have a problem sending or carting frames to Chitown to have a good alignment done.