It doesn't fit me so if I am wrong and it's real, someone else can grab it and I won't be hurt.
I just don't know Davidsons as we don't see them. there is a video but not sure how to load it.
I think it's just a rebadge. Any thoughts

I had a coffee with Schreck83 in Williamsville on Tuesday and was right near this his one. Unfortunately it was posted Friday....

www.facebook.com/share/MX7dpRj62xa9m6Mi/

Davidson road bike

$175
Listed a day ago
a day ago
in

Buffalo, NY" target="_blank">Buffalo, NY

Facebook Post

• Condition
  Used – good
• Bicycle type
  Road bike
• Material
  Steel

This one won't last. Shimano 105 groupset. Campagnolo wheels. Lightweight frame




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I don't know but there should be at least a decal on the frame of what tubeset is used.

The brake bridge looks like one Davidson would've done. The filing of the BB lug looks pretty nice.

Seatstay caps often had Davidson panto, but the pics aren't good enough for me to see if they're panto'd.

My Davidson came from the shop any tubing label.

Another tell would be D on fork crown. Also, if you see a serial number, is NOT a Davidson. They never used them.

I saw the ad and I thought it looked kind of "basic", if that makes sense. I was expecting a bit more bling. To be fair, the filing is quite nice

I'll email the seller and ask if there are any photos of the BB underside.

Is there money in faking a small semiunknown builder?

If I was buying, my worry is that for $30 someone can get a cheap decal set and install them.

We've had threads before about "homage" or "replica" bikes. Not saying the original owners are frauds, just saying it can hhappen. The original owner might not plan to hurt anyone but once the bike is sold on the new owner might not be upfront about what it is.

i bought a fake "Pogliaghi" knowing it was fake because it came with a lot of nice stuff. It was actually an MKM. @T-Mar now owns the frameset. I also got scammed on a fake Bianchi. 🙃. Just wanted to be certain.

Looks like a genuine Davidson Impulse.
Bill Davidson did not put tubing decals on pretty much all the bikes his shop built.
He did not stamp any serial numbers on them, either. I guess, those were included in the paperwork/receipts the new owner got from them.
Even the color is correct on the bike.

I don't know anything about Davidson bikes. But that bike, in that condition, for that asking price, would probably make me itch enough that I'd scratch it by buying it.

Sampled from video. Embossing on seat stay cap is definitive.
Interesting that this example has two RD rack/fender attachment points while the standard Discovery usually is seen with but one, suggesting a custom Tourer.

Appears to be the right size and would be interested in the frame/fork.

Serial numbers on receipts would seem a reasonable thing to do, but I still have the records for the two Davisons I’ve owned . Neither has a serial number because as Bugie will tell you, they simply did not use them.

It's a Discovery--grab it!! Like a better Specialized Sequoia.

There is in the PNW, Bill is very well known, highly respected, not small and been operating for very long time, his production should easily be in the several 1000's.

My ~89 Discovery
No serial numbers, no tubing decals, not even model name labeling.

If someone’s going to fake a frame it’s not going to be a Davidson they fake

I reached out to the seller. We'll see what he says. Have a friend who reached out as well.

From the fender boss in the chainstay bridge, we can tell it's not a racing frame. That leaves two possibilities: (1) a Discovery, a small-batch production model, or (2) a Signature, which was the informal "model name" we used for custom (one-off) frames. Note, many of the production models such as Impulse, Challenge and Disco, also got a decal with Bill's signature, so that feature doesn't make it a Signature. Sometimes the production models didn't get any decal telling you that. If you find that frustrating, join the club. It did bother me that they didn't use serial numbers, which seemed lazy and unprofessional. I never did hear Bill's reasoning for that, probably just "how I've always done it". Funny story, at the previous shop I worked at, I put a serial number in each F&F I made, until the owner made me stop! I didn't bother trying to fight for serials at Davidson because by then I was tired of that fight.

A Signature could be almost anything, including a near clone of a Discovery, which could make it hard to distinguish. But whether a frame was custom (for someone else) or not means little to the future buyer of a used bike. The one worhwhile thing you might get on a Signature is Prestige tubing, or Columbus EL, or any of a number of fancier tube choices than the non-heat-treated Champion tubes on the Disco. But Champion is a very good tube, so nothing to be sad about.

If you care about knowing who built your frame: Disco, Challenge and Impulse originally got forks and rear triangles that were fully brazed by Tange in Japan, to Bill's spec. The rears came with the IC seatstay tops that were faux-pantographed with the name, as shown in the photos. BTW, the name was cast in, not pantographed if you want to be excruciatingly correct. Earlier customs, late-'70s thru maybe '85, had actually-pantographed seatstay tops, rounded on top not pointed. Those were only on customs.

Tubes for production models came already mitered at both ends, obviously at different lengths and angles specific to each frame size — Tange made that all very easy. They did high quality work too, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you're a die-hard "Buy American" type. Later on, maybe around '88 or so, we got our fork manufacturing down so efficient that we stopped using Tange-built forks, made them all in-house, and it cost us less than the Japanese forks. We finished them to a slightly higher standard too, but honestly you'll never notice the difference. The main difference is Tange-built forks have TANGE stamped in the steerer. That doesn't mean the steerer is Tanger, it means the fork was made by them.. You could get Tange-built forks with 531 steerer and blades, Campy dropouts, whatever, so it might have both REYNOLDS and TANGE stamped in the steerer. Not on any Davidsons that I can recall, but I've seen it on Treks.

A Signature has one undeniably cool thing about it: in those years ('84-'94), I made all of them, one at a time from start to finish, little to no batching or other production efficiencies. The rest of the crew made the production models, and they were less experienced than I was, so part of my job was training them, and quality-control. (If you were hoping Mr. D made your frame with his own hands, that stopped in 1984. He and I only overlapped as far as actual torch-bearing for maybe a month or two.) Even so, I will defend the quality of a Disco over most any other production frame you can name. The small crew was highly motivated, trained by the best, and QC was quite strict. Exceedingly few warranty returns.

As much of a bike snob as I am, the bike I've probably put the most miles on is my ~'83-'84 Disco that I got for free, took it out of the dumpster with wrinkled TT and DT from a crash. Rode it for 15 years until it inevitably cracked from fatigue where it was wrinkled, then replaced the cracked tubes. Oh and the steerer broke too, so I replaced it with a longer one, which let me get the bars up higher. I ride it way more than my custom Davidson, a road racer, that has bars lower than my current physique is happy with. That flat-back aero posture is not the #1 thing I miss about being young, but it's in the top ten.

As to the question of who would try to fake a Davidson? Um, anyone trying to sell a cheap bike who had some Davidson decals. Some people think a repainted bike just looks wrong without decals, and will use any old decals they can get their hands on. You seriously have never seen that phenomenon? Seems to me I see it all the time. Why else would anyone use Resurrectio decals, an even less well-known "brand".



EDIT: Just wanted to confirm that few if any got tubing decals. I don't want to say never, but I can't remember one.
Also I can tell that frame is a somewhat later vintage (i.e. newer), almost certainly with a fork made in-house. Rear triangles (a chainstay with BB miter, and a seatstay with cast plug at the top, brazed at the correct anlge to a dropout) might still have been brazed by Tange. I think at some point we brought that step in-house too. I think touring bikes were declining in sales, most people wanted an Impulse, so Disco might have been too small-volume to benefit from buying large batches of pre-made rears from Japan.

Thanks for all the info, bulgie

Do you happen to recollect when you guys went to internally routed rear brake cables?

Pretty sure no Disco ever got internal routing while I was there ('til '94), though I'd be happy to be corrected. (1) I didn't make them myself and (2) that was over 30 years and many fried synapses ago.

The Impulse was the first to get internal, probably around '87. Bill might remember, or his partner Bob Freeman. I made Bob a custom in '86 that was sort of a prototype of the Impulse, and it had 3 housing guides on top of the TT, as did the first few batches of Impulses. Certainly by some point in '87 they were internal. Here's an '87 Impulse with internal in Freeman's Flickr: https://flic.kr/s/aHsiNRC6jL

BTW if you don't know Freeman's Flickr, it's an absolute Aladdin's cave of wonderous bikes, check it out when you have some hours to spare. https://www.flickr.com/photos/8379107@N03/albums/

Fun Fact, no Davidsons got any filing at all on the bottom bracket, and generally there was almost none on the lugs either. If they look thin, that's from buying (in some cases designing) top-quality castings that came with perfect thin edges, no filing needed. If the edges (shorelines) look clean, that's from super sanitary brazing that left nothing to file. Never any spatter, blobs or lumps. We really had lug brazing down pat, if I may say so myself. After brazing we soaked the flux off in hot water, did some alignment and tapping/facing/reaming, washed the cutting oil off, sandblasted and painted, that's it.

The lack of filing may sound like a cost-cutting move, but IMHO that's even more reason to buy, or rate them highly, because they're WYSYWYG. As opposed to brazing them ugly and filing until they look nice.

Regarding this particular example, would this seat stay cap be "rounded" or "pointy?"




And would these RD DO attachment points be consistent with a Discovery or a "Signature?"




Thanks for taking the time to share your knowingness!

Mark, I have a red mid-80's Discovery and am wondering if you can connect a builder's name or names to the frame. At first I thought "built by Bill Davidson", then "built by Mark Bulgier", but I now see that is not the case. Whoever did it, the work is flawless.

The crew grew to maybe 6 people making the production bikes at the peak. Then when alu, ti, and cabron nibbled away market share from steel, it dwindled, but 3 or 4 guys most years I'd say. From faulty memory; ask Bill or Bob if you want more accurate personnel numbers. By the time I left in '94, there was just one guy besides me in the frameshop, him making all the production bikes and me on the customs. Though the numbers trended up, plateaued and trended down smoothly, there was some churn all during that time, with people coming and going. There wasn't one single person other than me who was there the whole time '84 to '94 but a couple with longer tenured include Rick Gnehm (who I also worked with later at Match) and Will Meyers. Frank Kaplan was Bill's first employee, even before he moved the frameshop to Seattle. He overlapped with me in the Seattle shop for a short while, a year maybe, during which time he was sort of the shop foreman, in charge of a lot of the day-to-day stuff. He worked on early Disco and Challenge frames, up through probably '85. Don't make me try to remember everyone else who hung around for shorter times, at least 10 maybe 15 people.

As with most production bikes, no one made a whole frame from start to finish. The rest of the crew (other than me) made batches of around 5 to 20 of a single model and frame size at a time, so you'd do that operation that number of times then move onto the next operation, with several people working in tandem. There was a bit of specialization, with one guy assembling tubes/lugs into the jig and tacking, another guy brasing lugs, another on alignment or machining and so forth. But for the most part, everyone but the low guy on the totem pole could do all the operations and got to switch around, so it wasn't as repetitive as regular factory work. Not much burnout; when people left it was most often for a better-paying job. One guy went to work for SR-Suntour, one guy went to work for Shimano, one guy became a sales rep, one went to college etc. Rick Gnehm gave it a go as a one-man framebuilder for a while, making Banana Boy frames, mostly for local racers, later joining Match where I also ended up after a stint at Ti Cycles.

Oops I'm getting off-topic. What was the question again?

On topic for me. Love hearing about shop operations. Fascinating to me!