But are apples being compared to oranges here? The oversized caps that have been discussed for the past day or two are on bicycles built in the Ilkeston plant by Raleigh's best.
Your International, and the other bikes you ran across at the shop were built on the production line at Worksop, Nottingham, or somewhere else. What you saw and heard is certainly a plausible reason for this being adopted at the production facilities. I rather doubt that either QC inconsistency, or heavy-handed finishing were problems experienced by Ilkeston though. Doing it because they were stylish would seem a more plausible reason on the SBDU frames.
Cheers,
John Barry
Mechanicsburg, PA, USA
> From: Andrew R Stewart <onetenth@earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [CR] oversize seat stay caps?
> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org, marcus.e.helman@gm.com
> Date: Thursday, January 14, 2010, 8:07 PM
> Marcus- The story I was told is that
> Raleigh had suffered from too many failures at the stay/cap
> seam and they finally decided to fix the issue. Perhaps
> going overboard is some people's eyes. I can personally
> attest to the stay cap plates cracking at the brazed seam.
> When I worked in the late 1970s at the Raleigh LBS I saw
> many and my first International had one side crack. My take
> on the reasons the finished style was problematic are two
> fold. First Raleigh's brazing QC was lacking consistency and
> used very aggressive "cleaning" solutions to treat the frame
> prior to painting. I have been told that caustic stuff left
> behind in tubes was a problem. Second that the finishers
> were a bit heavy handed with the files (or grinders) and
> sometimes thinned the stay's wall so much that not much
> braze (or steel) was left. I saw flat spots on the stay from
> files drawn poorly more then a few times. The caps left
> oversized eliminated one of these problems.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: <marcus.e.helman@gm.com>
> To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:14 AM
> Subject: [CR] oversize seat stay caps?
>
>
> > Dale Brown sent a link to a Raleigh Pro with oversized
> seat stay caps. I
> > have always thought the oversized caps looked sloppy,
> like the builder
> > could not be bothered to do the work necessary to get
> the caps flush with
> > the stays. Is this just another esthetic
> approach to ending the seat
> > stays? Is there more to it than that?
> >
> > http://cyclesdeoro.com/
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Marcus Helman
> > Detroit, MI
> >
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> Andrew R Stewart
> Rochester, NY