bitt3n

When people say frame X is well made, and Y is not, I have a hard time seeing why that is. What are the key differences that tell you a frame is special, versus only so so (other than material)? Any pictures would be great!

mkeller234

I asked this question a while back and got a ton of great answers... I will try to dig that one up and post a link.

mkeller234

Until I dig up that thread he is an example.

This is my 78 Raleigh Professional's seat cluster. It's a nice hand built frame made with high quality materials but it's not meticulous. You can see rough spots and file marks here and there and a blob of brass in some spots.


Here is my old Mike Melton frame. The frame is mostly the same materials as my Raleigh Professional but the craftsmanship is much better. The lugs are filed nice and thin and the lugs shorelines are nice and tidy. I think the ears for the seat post bolt are much prettier too.

Procione

Is that seatpost chrome or polished aluminum?

I think what makes a difference is clean welds or brazing, frame material, butting, and tube diameters. Lots of arguments on shaped tubes, well, may-be. Everything else like brand name, chrome lugs and seatstays, cut-outs in lugs, drop-outs, internal cable routing, crazy paint, that's what make a jewelery bike.

stausty

Good frames look nice from a few feet away. Great frames look nice from a few inches away. Most upper-end frames are made with the same or very similar materials, lugs, geometry, techniques, etc., so structurally there isn't much difference. The difference comes in the exceptional craftmanship, finishing, and attention to very small details.

mkeller234

The seat post is a Campy Gran sport that was scarred up so I hand sanded and polished it up.

unworthy1

and the really great ones look good when you saw them in half and then see how well the bronze or silver has flowed into all the places you don't see from outside. Not that I'd recommend you do that to a good frame. Along those lines, it's often pointed out that a certain frame builder had mitered the tubes in the BB shell, meaning they are cut to fit together cleanly and follow the contours of the shells interior. This isn't necessarily going to make the frame stronger or ride better (tho it might make installing the BB easier) but it displays a high level of craftsmanship: even if a buyer never sees this detail (or can appreciate it) the builder knows what good practice is and doesn't cut corners, he takes pride in his fine work.
You pay for that.

unterhausen

Back in the late '70s, I saw a frame where this was done by a bike shop, really top name builder, huge hype around his new venture. I really have no idea what they were thinking cutting apart a frame like that. Turns out the builder hadn't gotten the top tube in right, and there were big gaps between the top tube and the head tube and seat tube. I wish I had that frame. I suspect that nobody would have known if the bike shop hadn't tried to have a cutaway display model. It was a really beautiful frame before they cut it up.

I'd say you got lucky with that frame, most of the ones I've seen from that era are a real mess. The thing is, I don't really see anything wrong with the older UK/European frames that were made of top end materials with poor finishing. The idea that you would spend so much time filing lugs and cleaning up brazing material really was not something that occurred to the people that made these frames, and it doesn't affect their performance at all.

mkeller234

Here is the old thread I mentioned:

Well constructed frames vs sloppy messes

bikingshearer 

It's really hard to tell just by looking. Mkeller is correct that the Melton sweated the details more so than whoever built the Raliegh Pro. But that does not automatically mean that the Melton design will ride better (assuming that both were built with the same kind of use in mind) or that the brazing on the Melton was done better or that it is more structurally sound. I'm not saying that such is not the case - and I would guess that the fit, finish, ride charateristics of the Melton are superior to the Raleigh because more time and care went into it - but I am saying that once you reach a certain level of food chain, it is hard, if not impossible, to tell which frame's joints are stronger or which one feels better to ride just by looking at the painted finished product. If you about brazing and metalurgy, you could tell more seeing unpainted frames because the effects of the heat from the torch are more apparent. But paint can do more than protect against rust, it can hide a multitude of sins.

Even a tubing sticker does not tell you as much as you might think. I have no idea what the tubing is on my Ron Cooper and, beyond curiosity, I really don't care - if he picked it out, it's good for the intended use, and Ron Cooper could build a better riding frame out of gaspipe than many companies could make with latest and greatest from Reynolds or Columbus.

That does no mean that a visual inspection is worthless, just that a visual inspection cannot tell you eveything you are asking about. The stuff mkeller points out - careful filing of lugs without leaving a bunch of file marks, lug edges that are crisp and don't have little globs of brass - indicate a level of attention to detail that, more often than not, means that the builder brings similar skill and attention to his/her torch work and to laying out the design. And it is the design and the torch work that really make the difference.

And you have to have both. Someone can be absolutely spot-on perfect in terms of getting the brass or silver to flow perfectly and uniformly into the joints and heating the tubes only as hot as is absolutely necessary and only for as long as necessary, but if they have no sense for how to design frames to provide the right combination of comfort, stiffness, stability and responsiveness for the intended use, the torch work is wasted effort. Similarly, you could be the most skilfull designer ever seen, able to match a rider to the ride tube set and right tube lengths and angles like nobody's business, but if you can't braze a strong joint or control the temperature of the tube, all of your brilliance will go for naught. (I don't know if Grant Peterson knows how to braze or not, but he sure knows how to design frames that work very well for many people and pays some first-rate torch bearers to execute his Rivendell vision. It's a smart division of labor, although it does add to the cost somewhat.)

Some of what you pay for with frames with a "name" - Albert Eisentraut, Richard Sachs, De Rosa, Roland Della Santa, and the like - is a premium for the certainty that you are getting a great riding, beautiful, well-made frame. You know it's damn good because there are literally decades' worth of damn good bikes out there that say so. (It is this factor that leads me to surmise that the Melton mkeller pictured is built better than the Raleigh - Raleigh's are generally good, but Meltonss are absolutely first-rate from what I have heard from owners.) There are plenty of lesser known or newer builders who can do just as good a job, but they don't yet have the track record.

A lot of the type of comments you mention - "X is well made but Y is not" - are the result of the word getting around about Y's cracking or not handling well, not from someone looking at the two of them and comparing the visuals. For example, no one knew that the infamous Lambert "death fork" was a structural disaster from looking at the bike just sitting there. If you took the fork out and looked at how it was made - and knew something about metalurgy - maybe you could have known. But nobody did that until the forks started to fall apart. In terms of structural integrity, the same is going to be true of most frames that actually make it to market in any numbers. Handling issues are somewhat different - there are certain elements of fork rake, frame angles, seat stay length, etc., that make reasonably accurate guesses about how a bike will handle pretty easy.

So while your question is a good one and well worth revisiting every so often, learning about the visual clues will never be the be-all-and-end-all of figuring which frames are top-drawer and which ones aren't.

mkeller234

Yeah, it's not too bad at all. Compared to the Grand Sport and Competition that I had the lugs don't look half bad at all really.

Here is a picture of the lower head lug