Originally Posted by
Bob Barker
I'm curious. I have a repainted French frame that I've also been unable to identify. It's 531db, but also has the Simplex drops and use of cable clamps everywhere but the chainstay stop. Does your BB have any drillings? Mine has two 6mm holes. Does it have a DT shifter clamp stop and what shape is it? Mine is on the bottom side of the DT and is shaped just short of a half-circle.
No drillings on the BB and no clamp stop on the down tube. And, the only braze-on at all is a cable stop followed by a housing guide loop on the chainstay. This is the barest frameset I can think of for a bike of this late an era.
But, I'm really impressed with the build quality. I have other bikes with the same lugs, but these have obviously been hand filed to thin down the long points. And, the brazing of the stays at the seat lug cluster is very cleanly finished - noticeably more nicely finished and filed after brazing than any Motobecane or Peugeot or Raleigh Pro I've ever seen. If you have any nice quality production bikes you'll notice there are still sharp steep shoulders where the lugs meet the frame. This is how lugs are supplied, and it is rare that anyone would ever bother to touch them any further.
This frame even has the bolt hole through the rear brake bridge "sealed" inside where the bolt passes. This is only seen with the brake removed and then you find not a raw drilling through a hollow tube, but a cleanly painted tunnel through which the brake bolt fits. I'm guessing a wooden dowel may have been inserted before the bridge was brazed onto the stays, then it was drilled and then lastly painted. Someone seems to have taken unusual pride in their work and devoted quite a bit of unnecessary time and effort to build this outwardly very plain looking frameset up with little details which nobody would ever really look for or even notice ('cept fer me).
This is just crazy stuff you might expect from a custom builder, but certainly not on any unknown virtually generic bike. Just lots of little pleasant surprises... on what I had figured might be just a decent bargain frameset, in a good size for me, even though with a tubing I'd never heard of. I later found a couple archived posts from several years earlier including one by builder Brian Baylis who asked if anyone knew of a stash of the tubing anywhere because he really liked working with it and the way it built up. Reading that was real icing on my cake!
