Originally Posted by Kontact

For the nth time, this is a thread about the availability of Asian production lugged bikes. It is not an anti-anything thread.

Lugged steel is dated. All steel frames are dated. Get over it. Lugged construction is harder and takes longer if you have the skill to do either, which I personally appreciate. Steel TIG welds are gnarly looking, to me, compared Ti welds or lugs or fillets. And while that last part is definitely just my opinion, I don't recall that opinion being all that unusual in 1990. So while lugs had production inertia, they also had aesthetic inertia through that period.

So I get your pride in TIG work, but I don't think the Trek Jazz line sold for less than $300 because TIG was a costly or high skill construction technique in factories. S3 is hard to TIG, just like 753 is hard to braze.

Back to any references or remembrances of Asian lugged bikes people might have:
Yellow Jersey in Madison still had access to Panasonics 10 years ago, I believe. Soma had a lugged road frame until recently. Some of Rivendell's frames were recently Japanese imports. So they never really stopped, But there was a point when a complete bike that you could find at a bike shop stopped being an Asian production lugged bike, and I'm curious if there was something as late as '95 or '96?

What complicates things is that a lot of the websites that collect old catalogs seem to drop off around the early '90s, and then internet catalogs didn't become common until the 2000s. So there is a hole in coverage.