Re: French diameter FD Re: [CR]Mondia questions

(Example: Production Builders:Cinelli:Laser)

Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 22:05:45 -0400
From: Jerry & Liz Moos <moos@penn.com>
To: Brandon Ives <monkey37@bluemarble.net>
Cc: Mark Petry <mpetry@bainbridgeisland.net>, Jim Cole <jcole@memphis.edu>, Classicrendezvous@bikelist.org, Joseph Bender-Zanoni <jfbender@umich.edu>
Subject: Re: French diameter FD Re: [CR]Mondia questions
References: <Pine.GSO.4.20.0106121624210.14854-100000@comet.bluemarble.net>


Sheldon has an excellent discussion of this on his web site. The French tubes were metric gauge, i.e. the ODs were whole mm, 26.0mm for the top tube, 28.0mm for seat tube and down tube. Other tube sets were really English OD, 1" (25.4mm) for top tube and 1 1/8" (28.6mm) for the seat tube and down tube. As to when, the French used these dimensions in the 60's and perhaps much much earlier, and my 1986 Peugeot PZ-10 still has metric tubing even though the threading is English. Why? I suppose the French, who invented the metric system, found it logical to have tube ODs, and therefore clampon component IDs, in even mm rather than in inches. Makes sense to me, but they lost the standards war in the marketplace.

BTW, my 1969 French/Swiss threaded Allegro and my circa 1977 English threaded Allegro both appear to have metric tubing, as do two early 70's Zeus frames. This seems to contradict my long-held belief that metric Reynolds tubing was indicated by a decal with text in French. The 1977 Allegro has a fork decal in English (frame decal is gone), and one Zeus has an English frame decal, plus Zeus experts tell me they have never seen French Reynolds decals on a Zeus.

Regards,

Jerry Moos

Brandon Ives wrote:
> I've only encountered this once and had no idea about metric gauge tubing
> then. A customer had bought a frame which was a repainted Peugeot or so
> he was told and couldn't figure out why some of the parts from his other bike,
> also a Peugeot, wouldn't work. Everything else was no sweat but the FD
> was a quandry, but eventually I just cut a piece of rubber the match the
> clamp and installed it. It worked fine. So what's the story with the
> french gauge tubing, when and why was it used?
> enjoy,
> Brandon"monkeyman"Ives
>
> "Nobody can do everything, but if everybody did something everything would
> get done." Gil Scott-Heron