[CR]hand-made clones

(Example: Books:Ron Kitching)

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Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 17:23:25 -0500
From: "Grant McLean" <Grant.McLean@SportingLife.ca>
To: "Classic Rendezvous Mail List (E-mail)" <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
Subject: [CR]hand-made clones

Flash,

Enjoyed your comments, thought you made many great points.

If all framebuilders used the same cast lugs, dropouts, and bb's, and all lugged steel frames looked the same, without any indivdual style or personality, sure that'd be bad.

But what if all pressed steel lugs in the world were filed by clones, producing identical results....What's the difference?

In either case, it's the framebuilder's responsiblity to create something that reflects their individuality and style, to make something worthy of discussing on this list!

Grant McLean toronto.ca

small snip from FLASH's great post: If some people want to insist on having a completely hand-made frame, in the sense that not only the welder was a human, but, further, that a human (not a foundry) produced all the components and he produced them one at a time (not in batches of 12) with hand tools (no machinetools, no lathe, no Bridgeport, etc.), then I would put it to him that such a frame has not been built since the 19th century. Not even Singer draw and butt their own tubes. So, how rough is rough? The theoretical limiting case is that a frame starts life as a crate full of solid bar stock: everything (tubes, bb shell, lugs, cable guides, bottle mounts) is to be whittled, by hand--no electricity allowed--, from bar stock. ('Where's the customer?')

If you are going to allow that a frame can be properly called 'hand-made' which contains at least some pre-fabricated components supplied by third parties--Reynolds, Columbus, or Vitus tubes, for starters; bb shells and fork crowns, to continue....--then it is merely arbitrary and unrealistic to say that the addition of subcontracted proprietary cast lugs, or pre-fabricated industry-standard cast or stamped lugs, or fittings, or dropouts, or internal cable guides, or spraying or transfers for that matter, is the watershed criterion of where a frame stops being hand-made and becomes just another step down the slippery slope towards the computer-controlled, robot-tig-welded clone we all know and despise.

G