Originally Posted by
steelbikeguy
Were there braze-on brackets for front derailleurs back then?
I agree that the existing sense of aesthetics and conventions about what braze-ons were acceptable held back the design of titanium frames. I wonder how hard it would have been to get tubing that was a bit larger O.D.? I'll just assume that new tooling for drawing a different tubing size would have run into a fair bit of money.
On the subject of fat tube aesthetics, I'm reminded of the Klein ad in the January/February 1980 issue of Bicycling...
When I had scanned the magazine and put it onto Flickr, I shared it with the Classic Rendezvous crowd. Bob Freeman recognized the model..."Is that Jan Johnson in the Klein ad?", and Jim Merz replied with "Yes it is! Gary was still in San Martin when the photo shoot went down. The story I got was Gary wanted a large size frame in his ad so that the tubes looked more normal, and he wanted a female model. Jan fit the bill, what is she 6' 3" or so? "
Jan Johnson was the wife of the recently departed Peter Johnson, noted frame builder.
I was surprised that there was an intriguing back story behind such a mundane magazine advertisement!
Steve in Peoria
The Titan did have oversized top and downtubes. They were crimped down to 1 1/8" for typical parts, a compromise workaround.
Teledyne did a nice job of welding the seat lug ears, could/should have been possible to weld on shifter stops, However.
Teledyne got Shimano to tool up for the oversized top tube cable clips, they shipped with Shimano seat binder bolts and headsets, the launch advertising showed a Dura-Ace build, sans logos.
At the time the Dura-Ace shift levers used a unique connection, not Campagnolo standard, that alignment did not happen till the 7400 group.
Decisions were made.
The teledyne when the front brake was applied hard really changed fork rake, all the flex was above the curve. The forks were beefy, like 24mm diameter beefy at the top, but still flexed a significant amount.
I owned one, a bike that "planed" if one was at the right cadence going uphill.