>Currently I am in Tokyo and I've spend a bit of my free time last
>Tuesday for a visit at TOEI.
Fascinating.
>They create their french style lugs by welding a piece of tube to a
>common looking lug with normal tungs and then cutting out the french
>outline and filing them.
Like Alex Singer does now. The old French lugs are all gone. Do TOEI
use metric tubing?
>There were two 50th anniversary frames finished
>with the famous "cable-less" lightning system. Amazing, the steerer tube
>of the fork has an isolated copper collar and inside the frame at the
>center of the down tube is a contact pin which is pressed against the
>copper. Everything is build perfectly and clean although no part of this
>internal system is seen at the finished bike.
That system was developed by Daudon, I believe.
Herse refined (or copied) it, with the copper collar inside the head tube and the carbon brush on the steerer tube of the fork. When it works, it's great. When it fails, it is tough to get to it on the roadside! But since it is all-enclosed, it seems failures are rare. On several bikes from the 1940s in our "The Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicyles," I tried the lights, and they worked fine. Bikes that never had been touched or restored, down to the original toestraps... (It seems that the main problem for this type of arrangement are careless dis- and reassembly during headset overhaul.)
--
Jan Heine, Seattle
Editor/Publisher
Vintage Bicycle Quarterly
c/o Il Vecchio Bicycles
140 Lakeside Ave, Ste. C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com