I bought a Falcon by Ernie Clements Professional bike recently and request help identifying it.
There are some photos here, nestling amid the sliding, twitching morass of advertising which I guess helps keep these sites free...
http://s880.photobucket.com/
It was fitted with a 1976 Suntour Cyclone rear derailleur (which I identify from the wonderful Disraeli gears web site as a "2nd style"), and a Suntour Apex chainset - heavily drilled, very pretty, astonishingly light and perhaps rather flimsy (just a guess). Nothing else to get excited about. It has a Campagnolo seatpin with the (well rusted) bolts so deeply hidden inside the arch of the saddle it took me ages of fiddling to get them out. (I am new to this hobby, so things like this from the revered Campagnolo brand make me scratch my head and pore over the toolset.)
I guess it dates from the mid-1970s and the Suntour drivetrain is original. But the seat tube has an ID of 27.0 so it is (I presume) not a Reynolds tubed frame. That seems unusual for a British bike. Does anyone know what tubing might have been used? It has a rather unhelpful cro-mo sticker on it that doesn't look entirely convincing. It is very light. The holes at the top of the seatstays look unusual. The frame has some badly repaired damage and I have to decide whether it is worth paying to have it done properly. Of course, a nice frame is always worth repairing, but there is a wide choice of things to repair and limited time and money to do it with!
I also added for your interest a picture of another project: a Roy Thame frame with 27.5 inch seat tube and a cross brace to stiffen the bottom bracket against the massive forces generated by men large enough to ride it (I am 6' 7"). It's rather a good frame, with cable guides just above the cable stops, nicely filed lugs, and tidy welding at the cross brace. It is surprisingly light for such a monster. It came with a hideous Campagnolo 980 derailleur whose fixing bolt was jammed in the body - either that or I misunderstood how it worked. Anyway, I had to drill it out, though I just about saved the thread. The TA cranks await a TA crank puller... The brakes were Weinmann 610 with the splendid Heath-Robinsonesque adjuster. The shifter was very sensibly mounted on the stem - it's a long way to the downtube!
As a supplementary, does anyone know of a skilled and enthusiastic frame builder in the London (UK) area?
Many thanks.
Giles O'Bryen
London UK