Super Le Tour Frameset Not Mitered
07-03-19, 12:12 PM
#1
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Super Le Tour Frameset Not Mitered
Had the opportunity to look inside a Super Le Tour frame from around 1985 and was surprised to see the tube ends are square cut and squashed at the head tube junction and seat tube/down tube junction to make room for the opposing tube to butt up to it. The head tube+lugs are one piece so it was wide open where the top tube and down tube joined in to the head tube. Might be a Panasonic frame, but was surprised they took this type of a shortcut in production.
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07-03-19, 02:54 PM
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This is definitely not a Panasonic built Le Tour, in 1985, they were built at Schwinn's Greenville, MS factory.
07-03-19, 03:34 PM
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Ir could just as easily have been be a M-a-t-s-u-s-h-i-t-a or Bridgestone manufactured frame, as Greenville. It would come down to whether Schwinn was willing to pay their contractors for the mitering operation. I've seen a lot of big name Reynolds 531DB frames with non-mitered tubes. .
07-03-19, 04:30 PM
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FWIW, Nikko one-piece, bulge-formed headtube/head lug frame fittings were pretty widely used on mid-level Japanese frames.
07-03-19, 05:22 PM
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By no means as crude as the OP's description, but even some Paramounts went cheap with the mitering. Note the straight-cut seatpost mitered only to the downtube and not the BB.
It's the legacy built around the frame - not the frame itself - that gives a particular bike status in the popular pecking order of vaulted marquees.
-Kurt
It's the legacy built around the frame - not the frame itself - that gives a particular bike status in the popular pecking order of vaulted marquees.
-Kurt
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