Originally Posted by
rustystrings61
Mine is 60 cm to top, so about 58 cm square c-c; I think Gitane is French for "Forget how it looks, focus on how it rides!" I always wanted but never scored one with the willow-leaf stay caps, mine have always been the swaged-over variety. Francophile's orange TdF is lovely and were it mine I would clean and scrub everything, replace the consumables and fit a good Ideale or Brooks saddle and call it done. Maybe fine a nicer set of Simplex Competition dt shifters, but that's it!
I was surprised this had Prestige vs. Criterium shifters. I think you'll need to step up to the latter half of the 1970s to find the three-circle leaf stay caps. Good news is, they added to two models, CdM and TdF. Bad news is, you rarely see those in the US. I think all the CdM and TdF also had honeycomb dropouts too? I'd need to dig on the Bible of Gitane by Chas to investigate
Originally Posted by
rustystrings61
[MENTION=413240]francophile[/MENTION], thanks for the offer, but the mismatched Zeus locknut has grown on me. I wonder if the previous owner fitted it specifically so it would clear a non-French stem. At any rate, it works, and I am happy with it.
No problem, just looking to help out a fellow Frenchie fanatic. French is only 0.2mm smaller. The Zues top nut may actually be close enough (0.1mm around peripheral) it just naturally fits. I just had to hammer a 22.2 stem out of my '80/'81 Grand Record steerer tube. PO had it down into the steer tube a good inch. No cracks or obvious swelling of the steer tube observed from this, either.
Originally Posted by
rustystrings61
Somewhere I recall reading that TdFs are found with three different fork bends/rakes, though how gospel that statement is I couldn't say. You can see the difference between my green '71 and Francophile's orange one, though - the bend on his starts higher up and looks like a bigger radius than mine.
I bet chas (tag,
verktyg !) can speak to the point about rake and geometry. I always felt like the taper on the seat stays was wildly fat at the top on the TdF/SC of this era, but very fine at the tip.
While I mention geometric variations in these above, I haven't seen anything nearly as wild as you'll find with the PX-10 ... Peugeot was
sacrément sauvage with their tubing angles. I don't know if it was because of the sheer number of bikes they were trying to kick out or what. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear some guys were building without strict jigs, and someone, at some point, dropped some boxes of tubing, mixing them up, and tried to cover their ass afterwards, sending mixed boxes of tubing to the build line