Dickey,
That's not "a piece of pipe". Those were split sleeves brazed into the bottoms of straight gage pipe steering tubes!
Motobecane, Peugeot and probably other French manufacturers used that method rather than spend a few extra centimes for a tapered steel steering tube. Gitane used tapered (butted) steering tubes made by a company called Nervor.
Here's a picture showing the split sleeve in a Peugeot U0-8 fork.
Back in the 70s we ran across several bikes where the sleeves were poorly brazed and came loose leaving only the 1.5mm thick steering tube. brazed into the crown for support.
Never saw a complete failure in one of these types of forks but I'm a "belt and suspenders" kind of guy when it comes to preventable safety issues!
I mentioned fork crown/steerer braze failures in a previous post. That problem wasn't limited to cheap French bikes. Here's a picture of a poorly brazed fork from the sacred "Big C"...
<http://tinyurl.com/2aljt4b >
Notice how little braze penetrated crown and stuck to the steering tube. This was probably due to improperly cleaning and removing rust and dirt from inside the fork crown and on the steering tube. Two minutes maximum additional time to do the job right!
One other thing, many "all Reynolds" or "all Columbus" production frames were not "ALL"! As shown above, many French makers used cheap sleeved pipe for steerers plus a lot of builders including some of the top names used cheap seamed tubing for the head tubes!
Fortunately, most bikes built during of OUR CR time era were over engineered! That's why we don't often see the kinds of unexpected catastrophic failure that you run across on the plastic and other high tech bike frames produced over the past 25 years! ;-)
STEEL! Still the magic material!
Chas. Colerich Oakland, CA USA
Otis Greer wrote:
> During one of our round table discussions, wow, some one found a 2" piece of pipe in their french fork. I have one in all 5 of my Motobecanes. Some years ago I was gonna pop it out the bottom, but, nope it was brazed in place.
> It is a re-enforcement piece for the crown and brake hole.
> Helps out~yes, hurts~ nope, not unless you have a 20-21" frame, and want to shove the stem way down deep.
> And the steel pipe doesn't hold moisture like the solid peg would. Why not take a 1/16" drill bit and put a hole thru the peg if you ride in rain?
>
> Dickey Greer
> West Monroe,La USA