One of the very many rewarding aspects of this CR community and the blogging facility provided by Dale and the sponsors, is that the participants can play at amateur sleuths.
Many and frequent are the requests from Listers for help in identifying this frame or that hub etc etc...and just as many are the responses from the onlookers and readers. It is, therefore, this spirit of all-for-one-one for-all that I now call upon in placing my first query of 2011 before the CR Jury.
The frame in question is one of my more recent purchases on French Eby..and it was awaiting me, well wrapped up in all enveloping cardboard when I arrived at at friend's house near Sancerre in November. I still always find the process of unwrapping such a parcel just as exciting as I did when, as a nipper, I unwrapped my presents on Christmas morning.
And so, armed with a craft knife to rip open the khaki-coloured adhesive tape, I started to dismember the parcel..and to pull out the obscurely-branded frame. The rear drop-outs appeared first in a breach-birth style, then the main triamgle followed by the head tube. The forks, wrapped in their own little cardboard parcel were securely tied to the seat-stays with even more khaki tape...more craft-knife action was needed. Most of the main tubes were shrouded in cardboard tubes, but I did recall that the frame was supposed to be all chrome-plated.
Attacking the forks first, I was pleased to find Campagnolo drop-outs attached to elegantly sweeping blades..these in turn being brazed into a neat 70s-type flat crown with two little holes drilled in the short pointed legs, reminding me of a similar feature on frames such as Eddy Merckx, Ernesto Colnago, and Delpierre (Gemini). Lonf tangs graced the insides of the upper reaches of the fork blades.
I then freed up the rear drop-outs, chainstays and bottom bracket. The nicely finished Campag drop-outs were rather clumsily brazed into the ends of the stays, with little real effort to decorate, drill, or chamfer the ends of the stays...resulting in a treatment that was not truly French, definitely not Italian..and not really English either. At the bracket came real shock... English threading..in a 1970s French frame.
Turning over the frame to search for a Frame Number, and finding No 559, I also found a huge capital letter 'T' fretted neatly out of the shell, together with some other neat work to a window in one of the shell's legs. Curious...
The seat stays themselves offered up a well-made brake bridge brazed into place with a pair of ubiquitous long windowed tangs. The seat cluster revealed itself as a truly French original, as seen on frames in the best of company.. However the long point on what I took to be a Prugnat windowless lug had been adorned with another immaculately fretted letter 'T'....as had the points on both of the head tube lugs....a very Italian touch.
So what I have is a frame that looks, at first glance to be traditionally French, from the 70s..well-built..hard ridden...losing its lustre in places, but with an English threaded bracket and fork column..and finishing touches of Italian high style.. The frame has only one braze-on...a cable stop on the chainstay well towards the gear-side drop-out.
What do the cognoscenti of the CR LIst make of this latest addition to my stable..an Italian stallion, a French frippery or a bast***ised British..? I have my own ideas, some of them quite outrageous, but it would be interesting to hear from others more steeped in Italian frames and names than I am.
Photos can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/
Carry on sleuthing.
Norris Lockley
Settle UK