So cool.

My 3 favorite Bob Jackson pics:

Steerer not brazed to crown


Broke at H2O boss, probably from overheating, though there's no way to know. It is from fatigue though, not crash damage.


Steerer had all the butt cut off, so it was unbutted. And this is a tandem! Witnesses who were there agree, this was JRA, though he probably hit a pot hole while he was using the front brake.


Regardless of whether it was crashed or not, an unbutted 1" steerer on a tandem is criminal negligence IMHO. At least this one was brazed to the crown!

Obviously JRJ/Jackson had a long storied history of excellence, but unfortunately they also had some careless idiots working there at various times, in the modern era. Oversimplifying a bit, old Jacksons = good, newer ones = caveat emptor.

Two long-time framebuilders I know expressed the same opinion. One guy you know (a member here) told me the thought of them making 753 frames scared him. He said no way he'd ride one.

Apologies to any BJ fans. I was one once, long ago.

my first track bike, a Bob Jackson had nice paint and chrome...

I ended up installing a Phil bottom bracket assembly. guy assembling it should have known better and or said something after installing the traditional BB.
the shell was one that had the Jackson lads in the shop really honking down on the bench vise, distorted the shell.
after I was was working at the importing shop, to get parallel faces would have reduced the shell to a 66.5mm wide.

There was a reason why most of those frames were upsold to Phil BB's.

In 1974 Bob visited the shop and I discussed the issue, he did not avoid it but said when I was to order a new pair he would upgrade the BB shells to the new Roto investment cast units gratis.
I ordered a Masi from Carlsbad instead.
matching road and track bikes was a SoCal top tier junior racer goal.
I had the satisfaction of buying them myself, my competitors had interested, wealthy enough parents. Hetchins, Pogliaghi, Norman Fey, Motobecane among some brands.

Thanks to all who replied! Loved the catalog, and would love to see pictures of more Jacksons that are still on the road. Fortunately, mine was one of the good ones, it arrived straight and true, no wheel offsets required to get them centered in the frame, essential for the Cinelli hubs where front and rear wheels are interchangeable. For those who are interested, the original saddle was a Lycette Swallow saddle, and the pedals were Lyotard platform pedals. Hoods have also been replaced, the Universal gum rubber hoods dried up long ago.
Chuck

In 1975, a Bob Jackson road frame from Stone's in Alameda was my first big purchase from my first job out of high school. The frame was probably built a year or three earlier. It was red with a white head tube and white seat tube panel, and it was beautiful.. It, too, was one of the ones with a bunged-up BB shell, which I discovered early on in the Davis Double Century when my bottom bracket came apart, scattering bearings hither and yon and giving me an exploded view of the rest of the BB. (I was going uphill at the time, so no crash, fortunately.) I knew even less then than I do now, and had no clue what the problem was or what to do about it. So I took it to a trusted shop (Witt's in Hayward - Stone's was significantly further away) and handed it over to Clarence Witt. His suggestion: have him install a then-new-fangled Phil Wood BB using red loctite. He explained that the threads simply would not hold without it, that I would never be able to remove the BB to service it, but that since it was a Phil Wood I would never need to service it. It worked, and I never thought about the BB again for the 17 years between then and when the bike was stolen.

Oh great, I hope the 753 doesn’t blow up on me. I took this out for a ride yesterday

It’s good so far, I’ve been able to ride it a few times since cobbling up.

In a lot of shops, there are less-well-trained employees who do the repetitive or low-end stuff, and they don't get to touch the "specal" frames or scary-light tubes. Whoever is the master, or the top journeyman, keeps those jobs for himself (pardon the pronoun but it was usually a dude).

I don't know if the Jackson shop was like that, but it's likely that whoever was allowed to touch 753 was better, or at least more careful when using the light tubing.

Plus, once a frame has a decent amnount of miles on it, the chances go down of it having some dumb mistake like an unbutted steerer*, or steerer not brazed (or main joint not fully brazed, an issue I have not seen on a Jackson). Those issues usually show up sooner than later. You could still get the issues that normally show up after many miles, like fatigue cracking, but those are unlikely to cause a crash. Steel frames usually give a lot of warning; after a fatigue crack starts, it almost always grows slowly, giving you time to catch it before it goes too far.

*actually 753 sets did come with an unbutted steerer, that's normal for 753. They get away with it due to the heat-treatment making the steel stronger... and by being a single bike, not a damn tandem!
Yours may have a butted steerer, but if it's unbutted, it's not due to a mistake. If interested, you can find out, sometimes just by looking if it's clean and oily inside, with good light you can see the butt transitions. Failing that you can measure the inside diameter at the bottom. Unbutted means it's the same I.D. at the bottom as at the top, 7/8" or 22.2 mm.

Since a steerer failing is the one exception to the "lots of warning" statement above, if it's unbutted you may want to reinforce it yourself, like with a snug-fitting 7/8" steel tube hammered in from the bottom, then drilled for the brake. That can be done cold, no repainting needed. Steerer snapping is also the exception to the "unlikely to cause a crash" statement above. I don't [expletive deleted] around when it comes to steerers.

couple of details I noticed in the pic of the OP's '71:
The long (1010) DO is the "early" version with a boss in place for the Campy return-spring, tho looks like it was not drilled or tapped so never expected to use one of the RDs that needed that spring-hole.
The bend on the fork blades are the most "French-looking" I think I ever saw on a British fork! Styles were different in 1971...compare to the other forks on later BJ example pics!

Yep, fun detail. They stopped drilling them for the Sport cambio early on, like 1960, but kept using the same forging dies with the "land" for the hole, for a long time. Seeing it in 1971 is surprising, but Jackson may have bought a tonne of dropouts and took years to use them up?

My '58 Follis came with Campy dropouts and would have had the drilled spring hole for sure, only someone drewed it to put a Huret Allvit on it! How's that for a dumb move? I lucked into the Campy replacement hanger, part number 80/1 I believe, that had the hole for a Sport, weird that a part like that lasted all those decades without getting used. So anyway, my Follis dropout is now whole, with hole!

I even needed the hole, because the mech I'm using on that bike is a hybrid of a Sport and a Record, with the sprung upper pivot off the Sport, which vastly increases the gear range I can get compared to a Record or Gran Sport.

So now I have a wide-range triple in front, and a 14-30 freewheel, lower than 1:1 low gear, hard to get with a vintage Campy racing mech. Nice for fat old guys.



The "claw" hanger is only attached to the cambio to keep all the parts together, obviously it gets removed to mount it on a dropout with integral hanger.
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