in Frankenvogue

Unless you consider the "every single item labeled Schwinn, or Schwinn approved" to be a purely single source bicycle there aren't anything but "frankenbikes" out there, to my warped way of thinking. I hadn't thought of the term as being derogatory, actually, kind of tongue-in-cheek way of describing most bicycles, or one that got built from the parts scraped together somehow. I am just frustrated that someone beat me to the Frau Blücher (Whinnnny, stomp, stomp) lines

Bill

i personally don't mind Frankenbike. To me though, I think of it as a bike you built from whatever...i.e. My Bianchi. I bought it as a frame only. Found a fork from Randyjawa. A wheel set locally. A VO crankset from here. Traded for some shifters and bought deralluers to match. Found a seatpost somewhere. Brakes from eBay. Pedals were a gift. In other words, I put that bike together from parts that came from wherever. That is my definition of Frankenbike.

Being a teacher, I hear a ton of overused Buzz Words....I guess you get numb to them as they don't bother me any longer...in fact, we usually keep a tally of which words get used the most in meetings.

I could care less what someone thinks about my bicycles. I used to have a show Corvette. If you want to hear about serious nit-picking on a high dollar vehicle, try showing a car for a few years.
I've converted several friction shifter/index downtube shifter bikes to brifters. Maybe I should change my handle from roccobike to Dr. Fronkensteen. So far none of the bikes I've changed have attacked any villagers so I'm not losing any sleep.
Yes sir, adding 10 speed Campy Chorus throughout to this Paramount really made a mess of it:

Just to be a devil's advocate I'll toss out this idea. Style is a legitimate reason to select particular components, provided they function well enough of course. After all, style is in the mind of the viewer, and a bike's owner (or at least this owner) sees the bike more than anyone else sees them.

My Masi wears a Campy crankset because it is "supposed to", and anyway it looks great. To provide the low gears I need it wears a largish FW and that requires an accommodating RD. So the RD is a Campy NR with a custom drillium'ed long cage. Why not go with a compact double crank, smaller FW, conventional RD? They'd be lighter and shift a little more precisely. For style, no other reason.

My Motobecane carries a French TA-style crank. It looks great and works well. It sure wasn't original but it is nationalistically appropriate.

If style judgment says don't go Franken then that's a good enough reason not to.

A franken bike is a bike made out of a bunch of stuff that doesn't match. I'm talking a different color fork from something else, a steel 27 front and a 700c rear. Mismatched cranks. Stuff like that.
A bike with suntour everything and a deore xt isn't
Some people just like buzzwords, and try to "fit in" or garner attention. I just laugh and move on.

+1 I have bought many Frankenbikes over the years. Brake levers one brand, brake calipers a second brand, DT shifters another brand, mismatched branded derailleurs that do not match the shift levers, another brand crankset, two mismatched wheels, etc. Sometimes a bike is so "franken'd" it is almost unrideable. Shifting is uncertain, brake levers the wrong style, etc. If the frame is nice enough, I will rebuild it with a logical and good performing group.

For instance, I bought a nice 1989+/- Trek 2000, it had 105 brake calipers, Dia Compe levers, Campy crankset, Suntour DT shifters, Shimano FD, Suntour Superbe Pro RD, etc. Everything was decent, nothing matched, and nothing worked together well either. So I rebuilt it with all matching Shimano 105 7 speed stuff, kept the Superbe Pro bits, and sold the Campy bits. Buyer got a bike that worked well and made sense, I recouped the value of my 105 bits by the parts I sold off, and I got a nice Superbe Pro RD for a personal bike. From the same seller, I bought a 1984 Specialized Sequoia, set up as a tri-bike, with a racing double and corncob rear freewheel. WTF? Rebuilt it in the fashion it was originally meant, as a touring/sport touring bike. The nice parts that came off that bike helped offset the value of the parts I used to rebuild it.

I have no problem with people calling out Frankenbikes that are a true mishmash of stuff, obvious random co-op or parts bin build. We see this on the valuation thread all the time, and it is a service to newbies to point it out.

I am not a business insider. My own Frankenbike project is composed of...

Cannondale 1998 XR800 frame
Cannondale handlebar and stem takeoffs from a recent carbon Synapse
Campy Athena 2014 3x11 levers
Paul canti brakes
Veulta wheels
Shimano Exage crankset and RD

And so on. That should qualify, I think.

My Super Sport came to me with one rusty Varsity rear wheel. The original alloy wheels were long gone and the original derailleurs were boogered. Their replacements are mismatched, but work, and look fine unless examined closely enough to see the labels. Although I have the original saddle, it's in poor condition and not to my liking, so it's off the bike for now.

I think for a while in the 90's it was easy and cheap enough for a manufacturer to put a complete RSX or STX set on a mid-level bike. This seems to extend to brakes and hubs. But by now the hubs and RD are often replaced, due to wheel theft or damage. This makes it more organ transplant than Frankenbike, I think. Collectors are going to look for all-original bikes but it's not fair to expect a working midlevel 20yo bike, repaired and personalized by its third owner, to be all-original.

I think the interchangeability of parts (or assemblies) is one of the really neat things about bikes. It would really ruin the whole experience if I had to find the one scarce little part that would fit my particular bike just to get it riding properly again. That's an obsession I will leave to others.

I prefer the term Shimergo.

All of my bikes are Franken-style. That's just because they've been well-used over the 30-40 years since they were new and stuff wears out. Then there's the changes I have made for my personal preferences. At least I try to make thew wheels match each other. Other than that, anything goes.

So is a 'Frankenbike' a misrepresented 'collectible' or a regular bake with a mismatch of parts? Or is it an old frame with brifters?

I really don't know, and I really don't care.

My bikes are my bikes, and they only have to please ME!

I first got into frankenbikes when I started playing around with gear ratios, then more heavily when I built the 1970 Peugeot UO-8 from a bare frame, using Japanese shifters and derailleurs (SunTour VGT rear, Shimano Titlist front) and wheels (Araya rims on Sunshine hubs), and an aftermarket Japanese fork with a reduced rake.

It arguably does have Frankenbrakes, with KoolStop pads, DiaCompe rear caliper, Mafac front caliper, and Weinmann handles. This thing sees a lot of use as my general purpose commuter, transporter, and beater.

+1
When I was debating to cold set an old EM Signature frame, a fellow forumite gave me the advice "Go for it, Eddy would want you to". Made sense to me...

^ +1 John~

Soon will be doing the same but on a classic Italian steel frame. Purist will cry. It'll be a 'monster' climber, hotrod. Goal is 20 lbs and done for less than $200. I have most of the ingredients but for a few things and then its fun time. No care to the brand or model, but going for reliability before weight considerations.

When i was in college and a young racing enthusiast, i didnt have much dough ---- i had no problem running Campy hubs with a shimano drivetrain --
A lot of my bikes were backroom parts bin builds ---- all high end, but at times older than the frame

My '94 GT Edge wore older Super Record hubs and tubulars with a Sachs 8 speed freewheel so it worked with my more modern drivetrain --- i was proud to run 'em -- those wheels were feathers --- It didnt bug me to run a 105 front derailleur or a cheaper tiered Campy crank either --- wish i had a pic of that bike

To the best of my recollection

MAvic headset
Record B/B and Veloce crank
105 FDR
the aforementioned 8 speed campy tubulars
600 RDR
downtube shifting
forgot what the brakes were, but they were modern for the time dual pivots

---- That bike was a hot mess in retrospect , but it weighed 17 pounds and was a great crit machine --- They were all good parts and the bike worked great - - i was 20 years old and was proud of building up a race machine for somewhat low coin

That's a good point about frame modifications. Thinking about it, my most extreme Frankenbike was my first Trek 412 I bought in 1980.

I added 3 sets of waterbottle braze-ons, top tube cable guides, (Edit - oh yeah - also a pump peg behind the seat tube! I really didn't like clamps going around my frame tubes!) and had it re-painted with Dupont Imron. Replaced the Trek decal with a newer version. Also replaced the fork later on, as I had bent it in a crash.

Early on I upgraded to Shimano 600 arabesque, (hand-me downs from my brother's bike). By the time I gave it to my niece in 2010, the only original parts were the frame and headset.

She moved out to San Fran - She brought it into a shop once, and I guess they were drooling over the "vintage" bike. When it finally gets stolen, I doubt they'll ever figure out it was actually once a 412.

I build a frankenbike last summer. I decided to build up my first racing bike which is a Roe frame; he was a small builder in the north of England and I bought the frame 2d hand when I was working in a shop and going to college. I built the bike out of my parts bin with stuff I really liked and I didn't care if they came from the same manufacturer or not. There are some campy bits: headset, super record seatpost, nuovo record front derailleur, and nuovo record brakes. The levers are modolos. The downtube shifters are suntour superbe which I like better than campy. The rear derailleur is a sachs huret new success non-indexing rear derailleur which frankly works better than a nuovo record rear. The crank is a sugino mighty tour with 48/36 chainrings because I don't spin a 52 the way I used to. The pedals are mks quill pedals because they look good:

And it is a nice color, BRG!

The term is certainly overused. So is 'grail'.

But both are well deserved terms that describe exactly what the person posting is talking about.

Most of my bikes are a bit franken-y. Things wear out, or I may want to upgrade something.

My much bigger pet peeve is when a bike is described as "Full Dura Ace" or "Full Record" etc only to see an FSA crank, or Tektro brakes etc.

here's my fronken entry, a '76 moto g.record, with sugino crank, vo pedals, campy headset, tektro calipers, aero levers, and cinelli stem/bars.



it just wanted a friend. it didn't want to hurt anybody.

I always assumed Frankenbike was a term used when mixing functions of a bike (drop bar MTB commuter) not brands of parts.............

Frankenstein is putting ale in a lager mug.

yes the term is a bit over used just like a Hilary bashing sound bite.

That's really bad in a good way,

I've always used the term "bitsa bike" because it's bitsa this and bitsa that.