Japan fans,
No cherry blossoms in Toronto yet, but i'm feeling warm and fuzzy reading about Keirin bikes nonetheless.
I recently received a pair of Kalavinka frames from tanabe-san, and found the whole process a pleasure. Sasha's site was a big inspiration to me, there are so many fantastic bikes pictured there. Yohei Morita's flickr photo albums also contain a wealth of Keirin photo information. Who would have thought that after 20+ years of workin' in bikeshops, i'd learn so much about trackbikes from the internet!
Thanks Sasha!
Grant (geesawa) McLean Toronto, (just a little west of Tokyo) Canada
Nagasawa's drifting into cut'n'plug and huge, garish decals is one of the saddest things in framebuilding, IMHO. I've seen late 1970s Nagasawas with a vast amount of handwork, and really modern ones with significantly less, and the amount of mojo in each frame just isn't the same. I find it interesting that Kiyo (who trained under Marc Rossin) has stuck with the older methods while Nagasawa-san has moved to seemingly more production-line oriented building. I'd be curious to hear what his reasoning behind it is.
As to modern builders, I had a Kalavinka built by Akio Tanabe for me last summer with all investment cast Kalavinka lugs and no plug-ins... turned out beautifully. I also went with the sparkles, for sheer shallowness purposes ;) Truly a KOF builder of the highest merit!
http://boxwood.subtle.org/
sasha 'big into japan' eysymontt/nyc.
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,+'^'+ sasha eysymontt
sashae at gmail dot com - http://subtle.org/
`+,.,+` new york city.