Originally Posted by
Atlas Shrugged
This is bordering on idiocy. I spent 4 years as an apprentice toolmaker followed up with 15 years as a lead hand in a custom fabrication shop,which specialized in precision metal products. Medical instruments, aerospace, military and astronomy equipment as well as molds and dies. Often our products required welding as part of manufacturing and assembly which I was involved in. You have absolutely no clue if you think that brazing some lugged tubes together in a jig is challenging at all.
Richard Sachs made very attractive frames to a discerning clientele which were beautifully finished but performed identically to others. As a frame builder gets more proficient he gets faster while retaining the same quality but the actual performance is identical. I find it bizarre on how gullible so many people are regarding frame builders, the input materials are identical as well as the assembly methods so the only differentiation is branding, finish and details which play no role in performance or reliability. Just look at these forums which has a frame building sub forum with over 50,000 posts, not a very rarefied group if you ask me.
Someone once reported a conversation with a framebuilder in which he asked him to confirm that any hand-built artisanal steel frame would be superior to any mass-produced frame constructed of any material. The framebuilder replied that some people might benefit from getting a custom-made frame that had been designed to work perfectly for the rider for the intended type of riding, but, otherwise, no.
The poster was astonished at that reply and asked in the framebuilder's forum here what they thought about the exchange. The consensus was that the framebuilder's reply was accurate and that he deserved respect for his honesty.
Reading threads over the years, I've learned that the degree of reverence in which artisanal frames are held tends to be inversely proportional to the number of frames the beholder has built.