I don't know much about trade frame builders though I think most were smaller than either Tonard or Knights. A good example is Wally Green who is featured on the CR site and who supplied many shops in NW London with frames - Don Farrell for example. Today Paul Donohue as well as selling frames under his own name is one of the larger trade builders - they do build some aluminium frames for themselves but I do not know whether for the trade. There are still a number of small trade builders in the Liverpool area building steel frames though how long they will survive is anybody's guess. Neither Tonard or Knights has made it into the post ferrous frame era. Tonard were also manufacturers of pannier racks. Keith Hardwick of Tonard set up Elsmar in I think the 70s who were the agents for Mavic in the UK. They shut down a few years ago - probably six or seven. Today in the UK almost all the aluminium frames sold are bought in from abroad - either the Far East or Belgium or Italy.
Hilary Stone, Bristol, England
Hilary wrote: Please note the correction!
> frame building ceased at Hobbs I think in the late 50s though they had frames
>- quite tidy ones, built by Tonard (who were trade framebuilders) in the
60s/70s
>
Richard Sachs wrote:
> tonard??!!
> there's a name from the past! we used to import their frames in the early
> 70s. we inventoried many alec bird frames that keith at tonard made.
> some of our dawes team frames were also made by them because
> dawes, then, didn't have a pro builder that could handle the specs, even
> though dawes was our team's title sponsor. we also imported knight
> fabrications
> from wolverhampton, another 'for-the-trade' frame shop. some were badged
> as knights, and others were badged as, well, never mind!
> are these shops still around? did they make the leap into the nonferrous
> era?
> tonard and knight were two of the major frames-for-the-trade suppliers
> that
> i can recall; basically existing on private label contracts. were there
> others?