Mark,
I held a raw one of those shells in my hand just a few days ago. Gave it to JB for a friend of his to use as a desk ornament. Interesting piece of work for the early investment cast era. They came unthreaded and the wall of the shell looks to be about 1/4" thick. Albert told me that the hole was not concentric to the wall and a large number of them were cut through the "E" cast in the bottom during the boring process. Lots of boring and then threading involved. Looked like a serious pain in the ass. I have some of the lugs, the ones that go to that BB shell. The "spoons" on the underside of the lugs are square; a little unusual, but what about Albert isn't. He's one-of-a-kind and so were his lugs. I think I heard that he sold the design to Schwinn during the gyrations you mention.
That's all I know about them.
Brian Baylis
La Mesa, CA
>
> Does anyone have a 'Traut with the cast-in cable guides in the BB shell, for
> above-BB routing? Looks kinda like the clamp-on Huret Jubilee cable guide
> (the nicest clamp-on guide I've ever seen), only the cable guides were
> cast-in extensions to the lug pockets for the downtube and seattube.
>
> How I lusted after one of those! The points on the lug pockets were so
> artfully shaped that they made perfect cable routing without looking like
> they were compromised in any way for cable routing - they looked like they
> were just really nicely-shaped lug edges that just happened to also be nice
> cable guides. All this is from over 20 year old memory, and I only saw a
> couple of them, so I might be romanticizing them a bit. If anyone has one
> or remembers them well - were they as nice as all that? I'm thinking early
> 70s, before the Limited, but it could be later, '76?
>
> I think I may have heard the story something like this: He quit
> framebuilding for a time, sold his tools including the tooling for this BB
> shell, and so had to revert to using other people's shells when he started
> up building again, a couple years later.
>
> Mark Bulgier
> Seattle, Wa
> USA