ironwood

Amsterdam and Copenhagen are modern cities in modern societies. You must mean "modern American society".

jackbombay

My post was joking, but was also referring to 'Murrica.

I have traveled around europe a bit and was able to borrow a bike in copenhagen, I rode it 120 miles in 3 days all over that city, best bike lanes imaginable!

John E

Perhaps it was stolen and somebody dumped it instead of being caught with it.

bikemike73 

GREAT and UNBELIEVABLE FIND !!!!!!!

Karma at work !!!

Hope it will be a " keeper" for you

sykerocker 

Hell, you've probably used up all your good luck for the next five years on that one!

Components? Looks like lots of Nuevo Record - not like you're going to have trouble finding bits in nicer shape.

wawine

I do resell lots of bikes, typically due to size, but this one is definitely a keeper!

wawine

my luck has been pretty insane on the bike front in the last 6 months. Last summer, I found a 1945 Benotto Cambio Corsa, making it the only one I have ever seen with a date code during the war, then in December, a 1963/4 Paratella IBAC team bike. There is only one other that I know of, but it is a track bike and mine is a road bike.

I am a purist for originality, so I will try to save as many of the original components as I can, but if I need to swap some out, I have plenty of spares on hand.😊

tricky 

Bumpingwawine , any progress on this bike? Or any pics of those other bikes?

wawine

actually no progress on the Singer yet, other than a conversation with Olivier Csuka about it. He confirmed that it was a ‘real’ frame, not a contract build, from 1976 and sold to Angel Rodriguez as his personal bike, when R&E sold them in Seattle. I suspect that there was a bit of a translation issue, as I doubt that Angel would buy one like this, when he was making his own. However, he apparently did apprentice at Singer, so you never know.

I have a really bad habit of taking on too many projects at once. In regards to the Singer, it was shipped as a bare frame to Angel, and built up here, so swapping out the bad Campagnolo bits will not compromise the original aspect of it. Likewise, the Mavic Module E rims are probably original, so tracking down the correct looking, yet high quality, tires for these difficult to fit rims was my first task. I have yet to mount them.

I had to get the correct decals for the 1945 Benotto and ended up guessing. I could not find any photos of a war issue bike, so went with 1946. Close as I could get. I still need to paint it.

with the Paratella, I had to have the decals for the IBAC team custom designed and made by Gus Salmon. He did an amazing job. Now, I need to decide on the blue and red fade/spray on the seat tube. Again, not finished painting it.

in the works are also a late 1940’s Vecchietti, with Vittoria Giuseppina gearing which I need to assemble and a verified 1959 Bianchi team ridden bike, which I need to finish the paint on.

my problem is that whenever I see something really cool, which needs love, I grab it. I then have to find something to flip to pay for everything. I make sure my hobby pays for itself. So, the ‘flippers’ get priority.

currently getting a 1983 Rossin Super Record in full panto, 53cm ready and a 1975/6 Peugeot PX10LE in 25 inch ready to sell, so the others are all on the back burner!

himespau 

Nothing new from this magical dumpster?

avecReynolds531

Absolutely unbelievable that someone wanted to throw such a bicycle, and, equally unbelievably good fortune to be the one who found it!

Congrats & hope it rides as well as it looks it will. Beautiful bicycle.

tricky 

I had no idea Rodriguez apprenticed with Singer or sold Singer's bikes.That's a cool little bit of Seattle bike history.

bulgie 

That frame looks too large to be Angel's. I think he rode more like 52 cm. Here's a picture of him in 1980, 2nd from the left:

The sasquatch to the left is yours truly. I worked there from '79 to '84. For scale, I am 6'1" not counting the hair. He's maybe 5'4". The guy on one knee is Glenn Erickson, Angel's partner. The Singer wawine has now could maybe have been Glenn's, but more likely it was brought in for resale to a customer.

I've often wondered about that bit of lore, that Angel apprenticed at Singer. I did hear him mention it, but I suspect "apprenticed" may have been more like "hung out at the shop a lot". Even if he was employed to help make frames, he wasn't there long enough for a proper apprenticeship, and apprentices do a lot of sweeping the floor and recycling the cardboard before they're allowed to melt metal. I do believe he got a close look at how they did them however, and it shows in his framebuilding style and choices. He didn't copy Singer, but the influence shows.

None of the written "origin stories" about R+E that I've seen mention a Singer connection. Like the '81 Rodriguez brochure I have, or the history page on the R+E website, or this article about them in a 1976 trade magazine "Bicycle Dealer Showcase". Or this Nov.'75 Bicycling article on American framebuilders, which says Angel learned at Witcomb in England, "with some additional time spent at a shop in Paris". Why so coy? If Angel really did apprentice at Singer, it seems he didn't want to talk about it in public. No one who knows him would describe him as overly modest -- he was good at self-promotion. Lest that sound like an insult, it's not. It's an important skill for a business like that, and Angel was not shy about it.

He did bring back some brazing torches that he got in France, and that's what we used in the R+E frame shop. We did the under-BB cable guides just like the way Singer did, and we sometimes fillet-brazed over a lug to make more pleasing, swoopier transitions, a technique done in France but uncommon in the US back then. This was circa '79-'80. I arrived in '79 and so I was only a little aware of what they did before then. I never saw any Singer frames go through the shop, but we did sell a lot of French exotica like Maxi-Car hubs, and TA headsets and pedals. The tandems we built offered the French oversized (28 mm) tandem steerer as an option, and remember, this was before modern OS 1-1/8" existed. 28 mm was used by Singer, Herse, and Jack Taylor among others, but it was exotic and rare in this country.

Angel designed his own tandem crown to take either 1" or 28 mm steerers, and to fit the wonderful Reynolds 531 oversized tandem fork blades, that almost no one else in America had ever seen other than on a Jack Taylor (Singer tandems being so very rare in this country). Angel's crown was a rough casting but very strong, and they looked nice by the time we got through filing off the roughness.

But I digress!

Mark B in Seattle

wawine

Mark,
I don’t know why I didn’t think to ask you first! I did message R&E, but there are no records that far back. My second inquiry went unanswered.

The 1976 article you attached specifically states that they did not sell new bikes, which is interesting as I have heard from multiple sources that they did, in those days, and obviously this was shipped to them in 1976. Maybe it was not built up by them, but sold as a bare frame?

The same article does mention wheel building by Glen, in particular. Do you recall if using a small flange on the front and large flange on the back was a particular trait of Glen, or the shop? The rims on my bike show this and are still rock solid as well.

Thanks for the input!

Doug

Doug Fattic 

Mark, one way to tell how much influence Singer had on Angel is the way he put his frames together. I don't know exactly how Singers were/are made but in one of the pictures I see of their shop was an alignment table with a picture frame jig suspended over it. I presume that when it was needed, the fixture was lowered onto the table. Each frame tube had two holders attached to the flat stock that represented each tube. It is similar in concept to the fixtures I have laser cut and etched in Ukraine. I think Whitcomb used a different method and I'm not sure they had a big alignment table. I'm pretty sure I know how they built but I don't want to write it down in case I am wrong. Can you briefly explain how frames were made at R&E to give us clues as to which method he followed?

bulgie 

Doug, good idea.
Angel built a window-frame style jig, but made of heavy structural steel so it didn't need a surface plate. It was free-standing. He made it as a tandem jig that could also be used to make singles, rather than the other way around, so it was excellent for tandems. It was fully adjustable to any angles, tube lengths or BB height we ever wanted, which was a joy to me after Santana, where the jig was not adjustable at all. (Talking '70s Santana here; I'm sure they got more and better jigs after I left.) In both of those shops, a separate jig was used to put rear triangles on.

I got there just as Angel's tandem design was changing from 1-1/8" top tubes front and rear, which were two different double-butted tubes, to a single Phil Wood oval TT from the HT to the rear ST. The Phil tube was made from 1-1/4" round, and so after ovalizing it was quite a bit wider than the captain's seat tube, which remained at 1-1/8". Thus the TT had to be pierced for the cap'n ST, which put an end to us mitering with files. Yes, R+E mitered with a hacksaw and a file until '79 or '80, when we got a milling machine.

Glenn was reluctant at first to mill his miters. For one-off custom single bikes, which is all he made, the setup time on the mill eliminates any speed advantage. He and I raced once, and I think we called it a tie -- he hand-filed a miter slightly faster than I got mine done on the mill, but the precision of mine was slightly better. And I do mean slightly -- Glenn's hand-filed miters, even when he was racing me, were amazingly good. He was making lugged bikes, so his miters were better than they needed to be. You could make the argument that there's no point in going beyond good enough -- the point beyond which, increasing the miter precision will have zero effect on strength, durability or ride quality. If that's true then Glenn won the race fair and square. I think eventually he came around to using the mill, but I don't remember. Yes it's a different story with TIG welded frames, but we never made any of those while I was there.

We tacked in the jig with brass, then took the frame out for fully brazing the joint. No pins, which don't really work on lugless frames anyway, which was most of what I was making. Alignment was done by eye and some primitive tools, cold-setting when necessary using just a vise and a couple mandrels. No flat surface in the place until after I left, which was Summer '84..

Mark B in Seattle

santa fe 2926 

This thread is very interesting, and if I might go off a little bit, please don’t be mad. In Montreal for the world championships, in 1974, on my PX-10, in the stands, having never seen track racing, met a nice American, who told me I should go to Europe and get a frame from one of the true frame makers before they retired. Well cut to 1984, and I’m in London, and visit Chas Roberts on one of his fathers frames. Even though I was working on the railroad, I had fantasy’s of building frames, and he was quite blunt that if I really wanted to apprentice, it could be done, but it was really a slog, and there was nothing healthy about the work, fumes, chemicals etc. And depending on your skill abilities, it was tough to make a living. So, back to the railroad it was, so for those that tried and did it, a great story indeed,

Dfrost 

Mark,

Thank you for that fantastic description of the early days at R&E!

My wife had Glenn Erickson make a custom in 1996, so we got to know him a bit through that experience. Then he (and his now-wife, Nancy) gave us lots of advice on how to get married in France. Unlike Glenn and Nancy, that didn’t work out for us, but he did spend a delightful afternoon helping us plan a self-supported honeymoon tour in France (1998) that included a meeting with them in NW Provence.

Do you know how he/they are doing these days?

Feel free to PM me with any response, so it doesn’t hijack this thread. The OP’s subject should not be derailed (pun slightly intended)!

wawine

Update:
I have this now done to where I want it. Totally broken down, rubbed out, waxed and then rebuilt. I replaced the rustiest Campagnolo bits, added better tires, new bar tape and called it good. I even kept the original cable housing. The frame is 1976, so the hoods are probably from the 1980’s, but I left them alone.

merziac

wawine

Great job, glad there was no more damage like the headtube, any touch up forthcoming?

It and the seat are a bit jarring, I would be inclined to get after the seat with good old fashioned shoe polish to protect it a bit, just my 2c.

TenGrainBread 

Nice job. It looks great.

wawine

no touch ups coming and the seat looks more ragged than it is, so I will keep treating it, but not add more color back into it.

there are lots of pretty Singers out there, so I will keep the old scars on this one, especially since it was literally rescued from the garbage and that is a significant part of the history of the bike. I took the rusty chrome off as it was functionally lacking and possibly had structural issues as well.

jlaw

I like the scars - and the bike. The scars show that this 40+ year old bike has a history and your nice work shows that it can live on for another 40, or more!

jackbombay

Bike looks great!

Crazy how good the paint is in most places considering the condition of the head tube.

It looks like the cable housings are plenty long so you could trim a half inch off the ends at the brake levers, it looks like the front brake housing is cracked just out of the lever and the rear brake housing is somewhat kinked right out of the lever.

mkeller234

That is a beauty, and such a lucky find!

Also, really great stories shared in this thread!