About a year or more ago I took in a pair of Witcombs belonging to some good friends from Back East. His and hers pair, blue paint, from a small shop in Connecticut, and the name Peter Weigle was familiar to them. I'm not a pro with an established shop, but these were good friends, and I told them I could disassemble and reassemble (they wanted them painted), and make sure all is working as it should. My friends only knew "these are our bikes and we love them!!" I spoke to Peter, then to Richard Sachs, then to Jack at Franklin, who had time to take on the frame inspection and advice on alignment. Both frames had some damage due to poor (no, terrible) brazing at build, Jack thought he could rebraze the points in question to a sound condition, but seems to have missed that the one pair of chainstays were offset, as Bulgie recalls. I am thankful to him as well for being a valued consultant, as well as some others on the Site here.
We judged one of the rebuilds infeasible, because of the misaligned rear wheel. It would have been impossible to make a bike that could coast, and for that one nowhere near aligned. I was arguing that both bikes should be tossed and both friends buy new bikes. But the gent was too enamored of his old bike (can't actually blame him), and it was alignable with care, some local shop attention to the fork, and some cold-setting. The hers bike had the rear triangles problem and I was fearful of sending it back to Franklin's and I didn't know of a more local resource whom I thought would accept responsibility. She bought a Trek for herself and is happily pedaling.
For his, he REELY REELY wanted me to do MY best and see where we end up. I hava a few Park frame assessment tools, and we were able to deermine that the rear triengles were vertically aligned and needed lateral matching. The main triangle seemed to be in-plane and the BB axis seemed to be perpendicular so we could get the wheel, BB, and front wheel axes parallel, so we had the makings of a correctly aligned frame. I checked true on all four wheels and trued and retensioned the best ones for his bike, checked the OLNs and found the rear wheels do not match the dropouts. More focus showed me we had to use the "oddball" 124 oln because there was not much clearance for a freewheel and chain. All my other 120mm frames had significant clearance fabricated into the drive side dropout. So again with the ***-1 to re-set the rear triangles to clear friction-5 speed, dropout alighnment with the H-tools, and we had wheels and mounting. We had the rear end aligned, true, dished, and tensioned at least by ear. Same for the front wheel and its spokes. I could even even out the tensions while maintaining true, afterwards restoring dish. The wheels seemed not too bad as far as internal stresses. So we built up the drivetrain using decent quality friction shifting parts, I gave him an aged Selle Anatomica, we fit him using my self-fitting bag of tricks. I took a ride to make sure the bike tracked and did what a decent bike should, and it ended up being a decent rider. The gent is a few years older than me and I'm 70, and he promises he does not ride it hard. If he can keep his pedaling gentle, which says makes him happy, then I am happy. He got some work done at his LBS, and had no problems with them telling him he should replace that death trap.
So a poorly made bike can be a good rider under low-stress conditions. This Witcomb looks good with paint, and with good used wheels and other components maintained and fault-free, it rolls and runs well. The tubing is straight 531 full-set, dropouts and fork-ends are flat-stamped steel. BB, seatpost, and H/S are standard, so no major issues with them. If it holds together, what's not to like. And I repeat my cautions to my friend and his wife (his best advisor) about every two weeks. I should train her in inspecting lug brazing for cracks.
I've had some similar good results in reassembling and "blueprinting" a beat up old UO-8 frame - lovely green, rusty finish, old wheels tuned up basically, and a set of cheaper SunTour steel mechs, rebuilt HS and BB - It ride very nicely! I keep it to make a good "true beater." Frame material does not necessarily dictate ride quality. I'd say good frame design, alignment, and well-installed parts are the keys to a nice ride.