While I can respect drillium for the amount of care it takes to accomplish, to me it screams metal fatigue and can look over-worked. Although I think Sugino made some of the nicest drilled chain rings going.

Ever the utilitarian, I have two favorite frame features:

Wide tire clearance!

And double eyelets for fenders and a rack.

The spoke holder is way cool, too. I had a kuwahara for a couple weeks that had that feature, but it was too big for me.

Do lugs count?

Oh baby!

I was gonna' mention graceful fork curves; I hate straight forks. Then I saw that auchencrow already mentioned that.

Chrome, gimme' chrome.

Full sloping fork crown like on my Raleigh Competition and despite my custom bike is lugged. I have a closet passion for fillet brazed frames. Just smoothness all around. I'm not much of a fancy artistic jewerly like lugs. I appreciate and admire the work that goes into them but I like a clean simplistic build. I miss panto'd and drillium work on components. It think it would be really cool if Campy did it on their Athena or Centaur aluminum groupsets. Drilled levers, chainrings, FD clamp and cages and RD cages then gum hoods to top it off. We all can dream right?

The more I'm around modern, mass-production bikes, the more I appreciate:

Small tubing carefully and aesthetically angled, and

either good lugwork in steel or careful aligning and polishing of aluminum joints.

Just about this whole bike has awesome features. Sucks that it too small.

Huh, then why chrome an entire frame?

To add extra weight so it doesn't get too light!

you're still talking about bikes right?

Unique lugs (Capella, Nervex, &c), clean forged dropouts (namely front fork, honestly), brake bridges

Flat crown forks and Over the BB cables.

ICR, chromed seatstays..

The nicest drilled crankset was the Stronglight 105 bis.



It came on my Peugeot PXN-10LE, and it was pretty but a bit too flashy. I was embarrassed when people admired it.

realestvin7, where can one buy one of those "brake rise" adapters? I'm intrigued.

I love just a little asymmetry, like when the chain side stay is chromed but the other side isn't.

I like that too...and like it half chromed even more.

Nice curved fork legs and beautifullied crafted lugs.

I shoulda added a disclaimer: that was Jerry's view and not mine; I don't have enough to knowledge about those sorts of details. However, I figure a framebuilder probably has that kind of knowledge.

The info came from one of the "Hot Tubes" features in one of my Bicycle Guide magazines from the mid-90s.

I once heard of a similar remark attributed to Ernesto Colnago in explaining away the ugly chrome decal he placed on the chainstay of the early 80s super. Hah. That was more likely a cost cutting measure, because in subsequent years the frames got more and more chrome, including the odd fully-chromed or even gold plated versions.

DD

Drillium man! i found it very unfitting that u posted a picture of a rear drop out with no drillium in it, i'm kinda rather shocked and appauled.

maybe you'll like these in stead.

Cable stops brazed under the top tube. I hate the braze-ons above the top tube that require 1 piece of cable from lever to brake, functionally and aesthetically.

Don't know about "favorite" but I'm always impressed by custom metal work... example on the Vanilla touring bike... front brake hanger thingy...

I know these pics well from my frequent visits to the site.

Beautiful!

that does look nice.. but the threaded stem ruins it :'(

I like these:





or even these:

^ nice lugwork.. i like it when you can tell the builder took time to finish the frame, filing down the lugs, etc. The first bike i ever flipped was a Univega Gran Premio which you could tell had lots of hand finishing done to it.