I am reasonably sure most if not all of the pantographed bits done in the on-topic time frame were in fact milled using a classic pantograph. Further I'm not aware of any "pantographed" parts at all being made today for bicycles. Parts generally either have little or no extra mass to mill away decoratively or aren't made from aluminum anymore. If there's anyone out there decoratively milling bike parts today using a CNC mill it's news to me. It won't be easy on complex shapes, it might well be easier on an old fashioned pantograph.
Has anyone got any examples of current pantographed parts? I thought it died completely out in the early '90s.
Kurt Sperry Bellingham, Washington USA
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Jerome & Elizabeth Moos
<jerrymoos@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Actually, I'm familiar with the original meaning of pantograph as a mechanical linkage for reproducing a drawing or diagram, or by extension, a reproduction produced by such a device. However the original meaning is nonsense when applied to bicycle parts. I think the extension to bicycle parts would be to apply the term to a machine tool of some type which which reproduced an engraved pattern in the part from a physical pattern via a mechanical linkage, i.e. the macine at the neighborhood hardware store for making copies for you door or car key would be a "pantographer" by this corruption of the original meaning.
>
> I may be wrong, but I would doubt that many "pantographed" parts are today produced by machine tools which use a physical pattern and a mechanical linkage. Rather I suspect the machines engraving these parts are electronically controlled to reproduce an electronically stored pattern. So at this point, the actual process has become so far removed from the original meaning as to render the word, as so applied, meaningless. Such a process is no more "pantographing" than screen printing on a water bottle of an electronically stored image using an electronically controlled device. Neither process is "pantographing" in anything remotely like the original meaning of the term.
>
> I suppose some might say modern automated machine engraving is "pantographing" because such engravings were once produced by a process which used to be commonly called "pantographing" even though this was then already a massive corruption of the original meaning of the word. That would make about the same amount of sense as saying that a modern photocopier is a "pantograph" because it reproduces documents on paper like those once produced by by a pantograph device. Actually the photocopier is probably more properly called a pantograph than the modern engraving machine, as the original pantograph in fact reproduced documents on paper, not engravings in metal.
>
> So I suspect that, aside from some really antique machine tools still in use in some tiny shops in Italy, or maybe some KOF framebuilders whose love of traditional methods extends to antique machine tools, there is no such thing as a "pantographed" bike part being produced today, and so if one insists on being accurate, the term is now completely meaningless as applied to bicycles. And once a word has lost its correct meaning, I suppose it can be used to mean whatever the user wants it to mean. And so Lewis Carrol was right all along.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jerry "Start at the beginning and go on until you come to the end, then stop" Moos
> Big Spring, Texas, USA