The cries in defence of Raleigh remind me of more flaws I have seen (sorry guys!) Of course, as a few of us have said, despite the under-the-paint slackness, these bikes usually worked fine.(My first "fancy" bike was a Competition that was white with Carlton Lagoon blue head tube and seat bands, with Zeus dropouts and Competitione cranks. I loved that bike dearly!)
Anyway, preparing for refinishing, when one removes the paint (quite good bonderized paint!), a long list of grubby details are likely to emerge!
Gran Sports, Internationals and Competitions of the 1970s have another nasty tendency...... They have angle cut seat stay tops, finished up with brazed on plates. Raleigh used a fairly unusual technique of tack brazing these frames together with copper (or at least a copper colored brazing alloy) The assumption is that this brazing alloy has a higher liquidus temp and stays in place whilst the frame is finished brazed (with brass).
Anyway, apparently the heat used to make this tack at the seat cluster was REALLY hot and, with the seat stay tops being relatively thin, many cracked.. usually along the edge of the cap or around the seat stay tube.
Also peek inside the bb of these models.. Not only are the tubes not mitered against each other, but they look as if they have been cut buy a dull chain saw! IF you take some of these frames apart (to replace a tube etc.) the head lug mitering looks about the same! I saw a Competition in which the miter rough as it was off about 1/2" Looked as if the tube was rotated after inserting into the lug and then brazed up out of alignment! Yikes!
BUT, I would wager that if you looked closely at a Jeunet, Falcon, Mercier of that time period, they would be just as bad.
Dale Brown
Greensboro, North Carolina