Re: [CR] Trek factory tour, 1979

(Example: Framebuilders:Alex Singer)

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:01:45 -0800 (PST)
From: "Joe Starck" <josephbstarck@yahoo.com>
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Subject: Re: [CR] Trek factory tour, 1979


Marky Mark, Seven minutes was considered the fastest possible time to hand-braze a Trek main triangle, with the one-piece head tube. That seven minutes included brazing the shifter stop onto the down tube, yo. Most of us did not braze them "ugly." As a matter of fact, Bill Davidson visited the factory in the early 80s, and he took a look at all the frames I'd brazed that day and exclaimed, "Prettier than Bulgier."

Now, certainly brazer ability varied at Trek, depending on experience and aptitude. When I was hired in 1979, my foreman made a point of telling me "These aint no John Deere tractors, you know." Maybe the guy who brazed the bikes in pic 16 missed the "tractors vs bicycles" seminar?

On the other hand, given that the seat cluster is the most challenging brazing task, that the colors look "burnt and splattered" indicates a degree of success, not failure, that is to say, it is much more difficult to attach a capped seat stay, as the Treks are, than to attach a plugged seat stay, as the Ricardo Sachs is. And it is also much more difficult to do the job in brass, as the Treks are, than to do it in silver, as the Ricardo Sachs is. To wit, to wit -- that's double wit --  whenst brazing the more difficult attachment, it is better to maintain heat on the seat lug -- even if that excess heat means boiling some brass on the surface of the lug -- than to overheat, and crack, the seat stay. So I'd say the brazer of the frames in pic #16 did right, in the context I describe. What Bulgier or Sachs can do in their clean white underwear, silver or brass, is a different context.

Also, the blackness doesn't always indicate a brazing foul. In brazing circles in Waterloo, Wisconsin, the blacknes came about at the end of the brazing cycle, on purpose yo, in sync with the brazer's anthem blasting on the factory floor, as homage to Neil Young's tutorial about Gasflux Type B: "when you're out of the blue and into the black."

Joe Starck
Madison, Wisconsin USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O1v_7T6p8U&feature=related


--- On Sat, 2/12/11, Mark Bulgier wrote:


> From: Mark Bulgier <bulgiest@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CR] Trek factory tour, 1979
> To: oroboyz@aol.com
> Cc: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Date: Saturday, February 12, 2011, 4:50 PM
> Dale shared these Trek photos:
> >  http://www.flickr.com/photos/oroboyz/sets/72157626028840922/
>
> I'm hoping slide 16 shows a pile of rejects!  Nobody
> ever brazed anything
> that ugly in any of the frame shops I worked at.  I
> know they were trying to
> go fast, but brazing them ugly and then filing the lumps
> off after is not
> the fast way to do it.  Brazing can be done clean
> enough that there is
> nothing to file off, and that makes a stronger,
> longer-lasting frame too.
>
> When I was at Davidson in the late 80s we got the brazing
> time per lug down
> to 2 minutes per joint, sometimes less.  Fast enough I
> think -- if we could
> have reduced brazing time to zero, that wouldn't have
> reduced the cost of
> the frames much if at all.  Those lugs never had any
> lumps to file off, or
> even burnt-looking spots.
>
> See here:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/9866331@N08/5436215251/
> That's Richard Sachs' work, so I can't prove it (I wasn't
> there) but I'll
> wager large sums that there's no post-braze filing going on
> there at all.
> Seems like he hit it with a wire brush and that's all.
>
> Now I'm not saying every brazer at Trek should have been a
> Richard Sachs,
> and yeah the bar has been raised a bit since those pictures
> were taken, but
> still I'm a little shocked at how burnt and splattered
> those Trek lugs look.
>
> My first attempt at a lugged joint, in '78 at age 21,
> probably looked like
> that pile at Trek -- my teacher said I "crucified" it
> (which seemed like an
> inappropriate choice of words, but I didn't tell him
> so).  But that was only
> a junker lug with two pieces of scrap tube for
> practicing.  After enough
> practice joints, when I was ready to attempt my first real
> frame for riding,
> I used some old (50s) curlicue lugs that Jerry Collier gave
> me.  They had
> all sorts of cutouts where files could never reach, but I
> was confident I
> wouldn't need to file any lumps.
>
> I saw that frame again many years later, and it was not as
> I feared, that I
> only _thought_ I'd done a good job because I didn't know
> any better.  No, it
> was still a frame I was proud to say I made, and it's still
> being ridden.
>
> Mark Bulgier
> Seattle, WA
> USA
> _______________________________________________
>

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