Has anyone seen the Ishiwata frames that are being sold on E-bay? These frames are listed as new old stock and are selling for a flat "buy it now" rate of $30 or $40. I found one post on this forum that spoke highly of these frames, and Sheldon Brown's article on Japanese bikes also spoke highly of Ishiwata tubing. The Sheldon Brown's article states that Ishiwata tubing is comparable to Columbus SP/SL/SLX tubing. Does anyone know if all of the frames produced by this company were of this quality, or are some of these frames truly worth $40? Does this seller not know what they have? What kinds of questions can I ask this seller to determine the quality of this frame?

Hi,
Ishiwta made some tubing designed especially for bikes. Nice stuff. Their regular tubing was nothing special.
The Bridgestone X0-1 goes for several hundred bucks, despite it's age, due in part to it's Ishiwata tubing. The XO-2 I had, which used off the shelf tubing, was just another bike.
Then there's the matter of design, construction quality. I have my doubts, but give us a link to the auction; and maybe someone will have something nice to say about it. There have been some serious improvements in metallurgy in the intervening years.

There was some great Ishiwata tubing made, it's likey though not impossible the E-Bay stuff is the straight tubing, but they did make high tensile seamless double and triple butted (their best) tubing called 022 and 019 with the 019 being the lightest; and both the dble and triple was stiffer and more responsive then the American or European counter parts. A lot of famous bike manufactures used Ishiwata tubing, Bianchi, Nishiki, Bridgestone, Fuji, Lotus, Univega, Panasonic, Raleigh, Peugeot, Schwinn, Trek, Specialize, just to name a few. These companies used Ishiwata tubing because the cost was less so the profits were better. I use to own a Trek 412 that used the Ishiwata 019 tubing and when I tested it against at least a dozen other bikes in that price range and this bike had a get up and go, or a surge to it when you got on it that the others using other frame materials did not have exception being a Nishiki I tested that had the same tubing. I bought the Trek because of two reasons: it was assembled in the USA and used Suntour components instead of Shimano which at the time did not have as good of shifting as Suntour.

Ishiwata is a tube maker, covered very nicely by Late and Froze. As far as I know they never built frames.
I'd be really leery of $30 frames regardless of the tubing.
Post a link it would be interesting to see what they are.
Oh yeah, Yamaguchi, Nagasawi and 3Rensho used Ishiwata tubing also.
marty

OK here's the link. Check it out, and thanks for info thus far.
https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=22681

I don't know. There is not enough detail in the picture to tell me much. I am not an expert at this; I was hoping someone would be able to tell something from the pic. I can't.

While we're at it I'll ask the following; did Ishiwata make Tange tubing? My old Bianchi was Japanese Tange 9 and the posts in this thread got me thinking that maybe this was made by Ishiwata.

-mark

Kook; you need to e-mail the person selling and ask them what the sticker on the frame says-word for word. The sticker will tell you everything and all Ishiwata made tubes had the sticker on the seat tube at the bottom. If he can't tell you this or refuses to answer your questions, then you may not want to buy from him.

Tange is a different tubing company from Ishiwata, they were competitors with each other in Japan. Both companies made excellent as well as cheapo tubes but Tange had more of the cheapo market with their only good tubing being the Prestige series which ranks very high. My old Schwinn Traveler (which I found a problem while stripping it so I trashed it) used Tange 4025 Cro Mol dble butted tubing but the 4025 was the lowest end before straight tubing and was basically a cheap tube set.

Thanks froze.

Froze
I may send the seller an e-mail, but I've already got an old Puch frame that I'm converting to a single speed fixed. If it turns out to be an amazing deal I might jump on it. I was just hoping that the seller was unaware of what they had. Judging from their other auctions I doubt that they are the type of seller to essentially give away a high quality frame. Thanks to everyone for the education.

May be the name only references the tubing. The hi-ten fork and stays are a tipoff to the fact it's lower end.