laman012

Show off your weight saving components!

23skidoo

Since you insist...

First pic is 1st-generation Dura Ace rings and cranks; second pic is two more sets of DA and a set of Suntour Superbe Pros I'm thinking about having drilled.




Last pic of the factory-drilled rings on my Nishiki Olympic 12.

Picchio Special

What I think is cool about drillium, and what makes it cooler than pantographing (to me anyway), is that it wasn't just about saving weight, it was about customizing your bike. This was true at least in the early 70's as local racers took their inspiration from the bikes of Eddy in particular. Kind of like the hot-rod car culture, it was a whole sub-cultural phenomenon. This was true of a lot of the way bikes were detailed out, but drillium was particularly visually obvious, and could be conveniently justified in weight-saving terms. I always think it's funny when someone tries to exactly reproduce a catalog bike from that era, when the first thing a lot of guys would do was modify the bike so that it didn't look like the ones in the catalog. There were a few people who discovered themselves as artists in this medium:

https://www.velo-retro.com/peterjohnson.html

Sure it went to extremes, but what form of fashion of the time didn't? It could be done artlessly or exquisitely. The point was that your bike expressed your personal sense of cool and fast, or that of your locality. Then drillium gave way to titanium as the new cool, Campagnolo's SR group did away with much of drillium's "canvas," and the spun-sugar style faded. Personally, I'm not that interested in drillium that isn't period, but that's just me.

JohnDThompson 

Factory drilled Zeus rings:



Home drilled Campy rings:



The ever-popular Huret "Jubilee"



Zeus Ti bottom bracket:



Plus a number of A9 headsets (very light), Arnold Industries bolts, OMAS Ti bolts, etc. for which I don't have pictures.

xB_Nutt

Very interesting. The stress guys here at work would have a coronary if they saw all those holes!

unterhausen

yeah, the edge distance is not so good. Then again, chainrings don't break very often. I should post a pic of a chainring I drilled out when I was a teenager.

purevl

I always preferred the look of really heavily "tuned" components, especially rear derailleurs. Drilling a bunch of holes just isn't as sexy looking to me as some thoughtful milling. The jubilee is a good example of factory tuning, those things are just so slick and petite.

Here are some much posted but still interesting articles on the subject.

Picchio Special

And, the tuned version weighs more than the tuneless one - proving once again that it's really about style ...

kpug505

I'm currently in the process of building a weight weenie bike and have a pile of vintage lightweight parts.....I'll post when I get home from work.

unworthy1

fun pics, but I can't get over that Peter Johnson lugwork (built by a teenager?!?). I wonder if he hung out with Tom Ritchey (there's only a short distance from Portola Valley to Palo Alto and Redwood City) there must have been something in the water back then...Was Spivey in the Silicon Valley area? (would have been called by its proper name: the Santa Clara Valley, back then)

purevl

Are you referring to the later generation Jubilee with the drilled cage? Like I said I think that most drillium looks pretty lame, I was talking about the original Jubilee. Tuning, in my vernacular, means modification to achieve light weight, whether it be removing material that's not structurally necessary or in the case of the Jubilee stripping the design down to the bare minimum required for operation. It's heavier because they beefed up some of the components to make it more rugged, not related in any way to the holes in the cage, and not about style. So in my estimation, the later one is de-tuned for increased reliability.

Picchio Special

Gotcha. I misunderstood - I was referring to the drilled version (not entirely convinced that the beefing and the drilling aren't related).

Picchio Special

Interesting question regarding Johnson and Ritchey. Those paper-thin lugs were the rage for a while, as US frame builders worked to define a "new-world" style - Mark DiNucci's work also springs to mind. I think Eisentraut was a common influence on a lot of those guys, and they would also have seen a lot of relatively exotic and famous-name bikes coming into Spence Wolf's shop.
Edit to say maybe I should have said "west coast" style on the wafer-thin lug thing, as it seems to have been regional to some extent.

JohnDThompson 

Hey -- if you want holes, here's factory drilled & milled:

big chainring 

I love the Drillium. I've got an image in my head of a Japaneese bike, mid 70's, metallic orange and drilled everything. I saw it in the window of The Wheel Thing bike shop in La Grange Illinois in 1976. Nishiki?, Sekine?, ???? What was it? I loved that bike!

divineAndbright

Ive been known to drill stuff out.















Not so much for the weight savings as they are super minimal, I just love the way it looks

purevl

Ouch, the bottom bracket, really?

RobbieTunes

That is one technique I haven't been able to want to do.
But it's pretty darn cool.

cyclotoine

I tried to do a campy brake lever with a handdrill that had some major road rash, the holes just turned out so non-uniform and I couldn't make them all linear... it looked like $h!t and I decided right there that drillium was better left to the machinsts with proper tool, but I do love it and would love to have corky's components all lightened.

purevl

I came across this today and thought it seemed appropriate for this thread, even though it isn't "drilled" per se.



Someone failed their intro to Aerodynamics class.