cudak888 

Kleins were also bondoed over the smooth AL joints before paint, Jim.

-Kurt

nlerner

Seat-stay treatment on my Falcon. Thick and zesty!



Neal

unterhausen

Thinking about filing Nevex Pros gives me a headache. It would pay to be very steady with those.

Look at the file marks on that thing. Considering the big lump of brazing material sticking out of the lug, you have to wonder what they took off.

miamijim

Use those little sanding disks on a variable speed Dremel. No filling needed.

repechage

That Miyata is an example of a one piece headlug/tube combo, its welded along the back side, but its probably finished off pretty well. Often seen on very small Asian frames, and some Treks even.

Care of workmanship does not a great riding bike make. There are countless structurally sound, well heated during brazing bikes that look bad but are of sound construction. But they are not pleasurable to look at.

nlerner

I think the lug filer was off that day. Unfortunately, so was the good brazer.

Neal

Picchio Special

Lots of good stuff here already.
It pays to learn the little details for frames/marques you are interested in. For example, Paramounts have seatstay caps that are "chamfered" - the stays are cut at an angle and a plate is brazed over the opening. Schwinn did a notoriously poor job of this - i.e., not enough brazing material, resulting in caps that have "collapsed" over time. But at least Schwinn did it using the old-fashioned, more time consuming, but also more hand-built method (and the ones built by Don Mainland et. al. are better done than the ones done in Chicago - one reason why Mainland also did the chrome jobs, which as pointed out previously tend to show flaws more easily.) The vaunted Colnago, on the other hand, went to plugs fairly early on - those nice, fluted seatstay tops from the 70's, as seen on Eddy's frames, are actually pre-made, and the top of the seatstays simply plugs into the bottom piece, a la Tinkertoy. Looks clean, but is basically a labor-saver, and heavier than doing it the old way, in many cases.
Also, note that as discussed previously on this list and elsewhere, lugs on bikes circa early 80's and later can be deceptive - they were often investment cast, which made them look more carefully shaped/filed, when in fact they came that way pretty much out of the box. Earlier "pressed" lugs often are less uniform, but actually took a good deal of time and work to finish - and in the best instances were artfully thinned, which gives a really nice transition between lugs and tubes and pulls the frame together aesthetically.
The gold standard workmanship-wise are lugs cut individually by hand into "fancy" shapes, as seen on frames built by true masters like Bill Hurlow and John Berry in Great Britain. This can be deceptive as well - Hetchins, whose name appears next to "fancy lugs" in the vintage bicycle dictionary, at least in many people's minds, stamped out most of their designs in stacks, multiple lugs at a time, rather than hand carving them.
Bottom line is, research (as well as learning how to "see") pays when it comes to bikes you are interested in.

miamijim

miamijim

You'll find Miyatas Japanese built frames to have lug work that exceeds what many of Europes more reputable custom builders made.

miamijim

cudak888 

And almost all of them will be cracked. They are on my '70, and same for the '61 (though the '61 less so, for the brass was globbed up a bit more then usual at the lower section). That said, the NOS '71 Paramount that sold on eBay recently proves that the framesets were delivered new w/gaps in the braze between the tube and the cap (pretty ugly treatment of the lug tip for the seat tube too - two minutes of file work could have eliminated it):



-Kurt

roseskunk

i'm glad i don't look too closely at my international or professional...

repechage

Actually the Miyatas I have seen are clean, even the cheap mixtie shown, all of those full line companies did what they thought they needed to do for a given price point. Raleigh I will say exploited their reputation and did not maintain a reasonable standard, as the images before show.

ollo_ollo

Schwinn World by unknown Taiwanese vs Alpine by Eisentraut

I know...Apples n Oranges.

USAZorro

They're not all like that.

I have four Raleighs in the house. I'll disregard the 1939 Gazelle because it was from a completely different era. The 1970 Professional is a very nicely made/finished bicycle. It isn't perfect, but it is very nice. My 1974 Superbe has voids and drips. The 1978 Super Course looks to have been made by someone who was either sort of new, or was hurried, or just plain sloppy. Perhaps it's a combination of the above, since they were still cranking out a lot of frames then, and inflation was running amok, so I'm sure there was pressure to get them built quickly and kicked out the door.

USAZorro

You could run through a couple dozen of those refining a set of lugs, and it's soooo easy to slip.

cuda2k

for an example of "good" work, look at a 3Rensho / 3Rensho built Allez:

unterhausen

I was gonna say, if you want super clean frames, you are going to have to pass on a lot of really nice bikes

And I'd far rather see a little lumpy filler than an undercut tube. The difference in hardness makes filing and sanding a real tedious process.

Bikedued

They look nice, but not what I would expect of second(third) from the top of Motobecane's lineup. I'm going to repaint it, so I may try clean it up some. 1975/76 Moto Grand Record.,,,,BD

cudak888 

Very good point. I enjoy the ride on my '61 Paramount more then any other machine I own (with exception to the late '91/2 Guerciotti EL), but the Paramount's build quality could be put on par with some of the cheap Windsors.

-Kurt

cudak888 

Looks more as if you need to give it a good cleaning with a Q-tip and Meguiars Scratch X. Too grimy to get a good idea of the joint.

-Kurt

mkeller234

Great stuff, all of these examples have helped a lot. This thread has made me appreciate what an art frame building could be. As far as my Raleigh goes, I didn't mean to give the impression that I think it is junk. I know it is made of good materials and carry a reputation as a nice race bike for it's day. I was really curious specifically about the work on Raleighs since I had heard stories, like forks bending back because the of voids.

It's exciting to me to be able to get answers from forum members who have first hand experience doing this work. I work in the printing field, a field that used to take a high level of knowledge and mechanical skill. Technology has improved the printing business, but the art of printing is gone.

Thanks all for taking the time to fill me in, this has been very helpful.

BTW, I looked over my Schwinn Collegiate, I know it's electro-forged and not lugged. It was pretty obvious where all of the tubes were joined, I never would have noticed that before.

mkeller234

Nah, I'm not after the perfect frame at all, I'm perfectly happy with my sloppy Raleigh. I was more interested in what types of things really take frames to another level skill wise. Perfection is a pretty impossible standard, even for a master craftsman. I would never argue that Paramounts are poor bicycles because they fall short of perfection, that would be a very weak arguement.

-Matt

mkeller234

Knowing information like this is the only way I can form my own opinions about frames. I knew the rumors of sloppy work, but I couldn't make up my own opinion about it since I had no idea about work standards.

-Matt

lotek 

A few Dutch examples:
1974 RIH built by Mr. van der Kaai and R. Bustraan.

1975 Remy:

ca 1974 Zieleman:

1990 Jan de Reus