One side of rear fork appears to be more out then the other + they seem to stand like one is higher than the other
And the head tube is bend. Tob tubes appear straight. Although one has a small dent
Pure-Nose2595 on
figure out some way to clamp the bottom bracket to a heavy workbench, anvil etc, anything that’s basically an immovable object.
Remove the head cups. Then, get a long steel pipe. Something as close to the head tube inside diameter as possible. stick it in and twist.
sargassumcrab on
Find someone at a museum or something that knows about those frames. It’s real old so anything could have happened to it.
It’s possible that the rear wheel was built without a dish, and the right side chainstay was asymmetrical. They look real heavy so in order to bend it out that much it would have had get whacked pretty hard. Someone who really knows what they’re doing can tell what’s going on.
nateknutson on
You do not need a frame table or some byzantine shop that no longer exists almost anywhere in 2025.
Many, many frames have had their initial front triangle torsional alignment set by sighting the parallelism of the ht and st. Is it perfect, no. Is it good enough for a situation like this, absolutely. Read up on how the Taylors did it. Some of the most renowned frames of that era were built by twisting the shit out the front end and then sighting parallelism against a window. Here the wacky ht means you’ll need to work with a smaller area to sight with, but whatever.
So in other words, get a big solid rod of something that fits snugly into the headtube. You need to rig it up so that the load is spread and you don’t deform it by flaring out the contact points at the opening etc. Clamp the shell with soft jaws and reef on the ht, incrementally at first. Once the front end is dialed, Sheldon the back end with a 2×4 and string, and align the dropouts. Done.
It is true that in this era there were some weirdo offset rear triangle things happening. That doesn’t matter if you intend to build it up with a dished wheel, unless the original design was so offset that it had intentional seatstay length differences that will make weird things happen if you try to make it symmetrical. That’s all a distant hypothetical and it’s far more likely this thing just got hit at some point.
4 Comments
One side of rear fork appears to be more out then the other + they seem to stand like one is higher than the other
And the head tube is bend. Tob tubes appear straight. Although one has a small dent
figure out some way to clamp the bottom bracket to a heavy workbench, anvil etc, anything that’s basically an immovable object.
Remove the head cups. Then, get a long steel pipe. Something as close to the head tube inside diameter as possible. stick it in and twist.
Find someone at a museum or something that knows about those frames. It’s real old so anything could have happened to it.
It’s possible that the rear wheel was built without a dish, and the right side chainstay was asymmetrical. They look real heavy so in order to bend it out that much it would have had get whacked pretty hard. Someone who really knows what they’re doing can tell what’s going on.
You do not need a frame table or some byzantine shop that no longer exists almost anywhere in 2025.
Many, many frames have had their initial front triangle torsional alignment set by sighting the parallelism of the ht and st. Is it perfect, no. Is it good enough for a situation like this, absolutely. Read up on how the Taylors did it. Some of the most renowned frames of that era were built by twisting the shit out the front end and then sighting parallelism against a window. Here the wacky ht means you’ll need to work with a smaller area to sight with, but whatever.
So in other words, get a big solid rod of something that fits snugly into the headtube. You need to rig it up so that the load is spread and you don’t deform it by flaring out the contact points at the opening etc. Clamp the shell with soft jaws and reef on the ht, incrementally at first. Once the front end is dialed, Sheldon the back end with a 2×4 and string, and align the dropouts. Done.
It is true that in this era there were some weirdo offset rear triangle things happening. That doesn’t matter if you intend to build it up with a dished wheel, unless the original design was so offset that it had intentional seatstay length differences that will make weird things happen if you try to make it symmetrical. That’s all a distant hypothetical and it’s far more likely this thing just got hit at some point.