First I've got to say the whole KOF thing is tedious and old. Alas we rehash it every 6 weeks or so, please everybody check the archives and re-read everything posted in the past to make sure you're adding to the signal and not the noise. The only new thing I've seen in this new thread is folks talking about builders who use a file. It's time to burst some bubbles.
Most builders who are "KOF" don't really use files the way most folks seem to think. These days I'm the only guy I know who does ALL their mitering with a file and a grinder. This is no boast because I'd be using a lathe or mill just like everyone else for my mitering if I could afford one and had the shop space. People talk about how lugs show the hand of the builder more and that too is totally false. I would say that in the U.S. there only maybe a dozen to two-dozen builders that regularly alter the lugs on the frames they build. Everybody who uses lugs cleans them up and maybe deepens a valley or sharpens a peak, but very few and I mean very few builder really alter the lug itself in any real fundamental way. On the other hand I know of only a couple of builders who can lay-down a fillet joint so clean and smooth that rarely does a file need to touch it. Really clean fillet-brazing is really where you truly see the hand of the builder because you don't see the joint.
I really hate to say it but the vision most folks on the CR list of the framebuilder is mostly fed by pictures for 30+ years ago. Things have come a long way since then, just as they had the 30 years before that. This is not to say that the vise and the file are not some of the most important tools for the builder, they are the basis for building. The day of the builder sweating over a brazing-hearth, spending half-an-hour cleaning up a crappy sand-cast BB shell, and aligning frames with a stick some string and a vise and pretty are much over. This is now the domain of the hobbyist builder. I'd recommend a visit in the flesh to your local builder (pro, KOF, or hobbyist) to see what it's really all about. best, Brandon"monkeyman"Ives Off to Seattle to braze up another frame, but keeping my files and vise in Vancouver, B.C.