My call would be that nationality had as much to do with this as age. My
first good bike was an Allegro that was made around 1965, it had braze-on
everything including bar end shifter cable stops and stops for using split
rear brake cable housing. There were also threaded spots in the brake and
chainstay bridges and an oiler hole in the bb shell! Italian bikes of the
same period had fewer brazeons although the higher end Italian frames of
that time (Cinelli, Masi) had shift lever bosses more often than, say,
Frejus, Olmo, or Ideor. With British and French frames, it seems like the
more towards racing, the fewer brazed on fittings even within the same brand
in the same year. Then there's little odd stuff, like Mondias having a
little loop halfway between both rear brake cable housing stops for the
cable to run through and Lejeunes with a loop on the right seatstay for
derailleur cable housing. Age and nationality are general indicators, but
not cast in stone--or steel. Then there's the chance of a framebuilder
indulging the whim of a customer, sometimes to the customer's detriment.
Some guy that raced in juniors when I did had this Ritchey, the story of
which was that customer ordered the biggest, fattest chainstays that Tom
could find, but wanted no cable housing stop in line with the early 70's
phobia about brazeons (nonsense, because most small fittings can be brazed
with silver at a temperature that doesn't even get the tube red.) Of
course, there wasn't any cable stop available to clamp onto the oversize
chainstay and he rode the bike with the cable housing taped and ziptied to
the stay!
David Feldman
----------
>From: Roadgiant@cs.com
>To: OROBOYZ@aol.com, jfbender@umich.edu, classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
>Subject: [Classicrendezvous] A matter of style?
>Date: Fri, Oct 27, 2000, 1:11 AM
>
>Listers, (do we have a better collected name for ourselves that I'm unaware
>of?)
> Is it possible to make a general statement about a bicycle's age relative
>to its braze-ons or lack thereof?
> For example: could you say that from
> 1960-73 the general style was no braze ons except top of BB cable guides
> 1973-71 top tube cable guides, braze on shifter bosses
> 1971-1981 underside BB cable guides, top tube, downtube shifter bosses
> 1981-84 full braze-ons including front derailleur hangers, seat tube
>water bottle braze-ons.
>
> And is there a progression of fork crown styles from flat to full sloping
>throughout the same period. And what can be said of the 1950's as regards
>braze-ons?
>
> My Fuji is from 1976 and is as minimal in braze-on's as a 1970 Masi. Was
>is all just a matter of style?
>
> Scott "Great sadness over the Mets loss " Smith