Thanks, folks ... where else can a guy toss out a couple of observations about frames and end up with a long string about the soul? ;-)

In all seriousness, I meant no insult to Japanese steel frames from the glory years, or to their makers; my personal preference, be it in furniture or architecture or music or guitars, has always run to the hand-crafted. Being able to see the hand of a thing's maker in the final creation has always pleased me, and with the Japanese frames that's hard for me to do, because they're such clean and consistent A- work. There is art - and soul - in perfecting an industrial process. But for me, I like looking at a frame and being able to picture some retired racer named Reg or Wes hunched over it in a Stygian workshop somewhere in Yorkshire, file in hand.

As far as the clearcoat goes, I wish it could be so, but one of the things which I had to do was cut off and file down the top tube braze-on cable guides, which had rusted badly. They left some residual pitting and staining, and while the damage isn't structural, it ain't pretty, neither ...