A friend was just telling me about some conversations he was having at the Cirque du Cyclism the other weekend that ran along the same lines.
He's had a Della Santa frame that he has held as precious for years and finally got it all together only to find it just not right. He went to a fitting and discovered that it has too long a top tube in its basic geometry that apparently moves him beyond the envelope of the original design expectation when he tried to adjust by stem extension or seat position/seat post options. What seems to be the thread common to Mertz, DiNucci and some of the other old builders present was workmanship presumed of all frames. The attention to detail let on that whoever filed a lug cared deeply, perhaps beyond the quantification of monetary value of their obsessive expense of time on such. Today we are able to crunch numbers so easily, to enumerate the exchange necessary for costs that we've moved beyond the intrinsic value of craftsmanship to heel to the MBAs and finance departments who seek parody of gain for expenses quantifiable. So perhaps today it is business modeling that limits the obsession able to be administered to make even a well designed steel frame still seem less special than one from the '60s or '70s, back when everything took more time and that spendthrift filing lugs may have been well spent while waiting for the phone to ring or the mail to arrive. My friend saw a very early Tom Ritchey that was made for one of those builder's wife which he said was breathtaking in such details. Andy Cheatham Pittsburgh -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
