Re: Quality Building: Bikefanclub.com

This is an interesting point. "Overkill" is likely just cost though I take your point: there is likely enough to say a frame is built well-enough using the techniques that the bike industry uses (stress tests of various sorts) and far short of the hacksaw revelation. But there are all sorts of areas in bike construction and finishing where cost is the simplest reason why things are done the way they are done. One that quickly comes to mind is paint. As nice as some paint is on bikes---say, the best of the best, like Joe Bell---the technology in the auto industry is beyond comparison (at least as Joe would tell it, not to speak for him but just to say...). In contrast, does anyone remember that video from Colnago that used to be somewhere on the Internet where the lugged steel bike was on a conveyor belt and you saw a machine heat up the lugs and at the end of the belt a real human finally put on the final touches? The certain implication was that this method was a modern technological advance when what it looked like to me was a short cut to eliminate humans with a device that did nothing to improve quality and likely diminish it (by over heating the lugs). Of course, I'd bet these bikes held together just fine. I suppose my point is that in the European mind---when they were still building lugged bikes...and Colnago still does at least partly, and I am MUCH disappointed with their tacking a plastic wishbone rear end on the Masterlight this year---the craft was meant to move along, get onto the new technology of the assembly line or something, but quite the opposite of advancing a romantic notion of handbuilt frames (which was likely always a very romantic notion).

dbrk

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