Anyone here with a Ken Ryall?

So a 1975 frame with some '80's braze-ons? If they'd wanted to make it more convincing they should have got some brazed on bits for the rear brake cable on the top-tube. Using those 3 little chrome clips is so 1970's

Yeah nutted brakes.
 
I have a 70's Falcon San Remo sorted for me by Billy Holmes, it's in Giro D'italia pink but there you go LOL

The "official" reason the frame makers in the 70's didn't braze things on is that the Campag sponsored teams used everything Campag including the cable guides for the BB, the cable clips on the top tube and the incredibly small cable clip for the rear mech....

Shaun
 
What frame numbering system were Falcon using? And presumably thats not the original colour? Pink's not too bad... Poulidor got away with it!

I hadn't thought about that being a reason for no braze-ons. I'm sure you're aware of the other reason. Stays and forks is one thing, but personally I'm happy not to see thin-walled frame tubes stressed up with all that stuff.

Also I suppose the '70's is closer to the time when you had
one bike (imagine that :shock: :) ) which had to do everything you might ask a bike to do, and if you were stripping it down for the track, you didn't want a load of brazed on bits sticking out all over the place.

Another consideration is that when you are repainting a frame the braze ons are a pain in the arse both to clean off the old paint and to apply the new paint. But then all those little clips can be a pain in the arse too, plus murder on your new paint job!
 
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Hopefully there's a pic of the bike behind my bob jackson. It actually left the factory that colour as I had it made for me frame number 98486. :) IIRC they had 6 women making the frames at that time.

They also made me a track frame that appeared in white LOL

The colour is the same as the seat tube pink decals on the Falcon Eddy Merck

No 531 stickers, no Ernie Clements signatures just a couple of falcon transfers and sticker on the seat tube and head tube. The sticker on the seat tube is a Shimano one as I ran t shimano equiped, you can just see the black 1st gen levers, Currently has campag cranks with drilled / cutout chainrings.

Never quite worked out what the frame numbers were for the Falcons. I guess they started at 1 and went from there. 50000 ish numbers were 1972 and mine should be a 76.

My avatar is me riding it :)

Shaun
 
Some interesting angles in your picture, redolent of an elbow-intensive close sprint finish from beaucoup yonks ago!

The Falcon looks like it's got two brake bridges and serious stack-height.

The B.Jack. looks a bit later with those fat forks.... not much rake on 'em, but not a track frame, not with those brake cable guides on the top tube. An early '80's TT frame?

I dig the pink. Falcon San Remo Rosa! It makes you want to load up your bidon with a chianti/cinzano/campagnolo cocktail and cruise contemptuously down the middle of the screaming highway holding up the fuming automobilistas behind you, with a bouquet of twenty-nine wilting roses on your handlebars and a fragile dream in your heart!

......... Or something like that..... :oops: YMMV.. Sequential frame numbering then for Falcon. Same with B.Jack. With a few wild cards thrown in whenever one of those six lasses rebelled against the depressing monotonous linearity of stamping bottom brackets 98483...98484...98485... :D Just kidding. Nice frames both. I bet you got a stack of old frames knocking about. How about you dig out that old Ken Ryall and tell me if the serial number starts with a.................................................?
 
Bob Jackson Frame made by Kevin Sayles is mid 70's......the giveaway is the Weinmann 500 brake's brazed to the frame. They were the shortest and lightest at the time and Kevin even drilled them out LOL

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they are visible somewhere in the box........

I was born in 1959 and a lot of my kit has been lost along the way :)

Shaun
 
Midlife, there is something strangely refreshing about the artless candour with which you display your collection of classic componentry, as if to say: "Here it is- I ain't polishing it or presenting it...This is where I chucked it when I stripped the bike down and there it will stay". You are inviting us to have a nose around in there, so here we go, ready to be corrected by you when we have done our guesswork. :)

First off we can't help but notice those brakes, one Dura-ace and one Campag? They seem to have escaped the gravity of the box, possibly because they were obscuring a tantalising glimpse of a drilliumised nuovo record rear mech, might even be a first generation Super record with titanium pivots. Those bars look like Cinelli 66, on a black anodised fluted stem, could be a 1a, I'd guess 11 or 12cm. A Nuovo Record brake lever, behind which a large flange hub I will not guess. Half a drilliumised Weinmann 500 caliper, and a Nuovo Record seatpost. The other brake lever still attached to the bars is not I think the other Campag. one, so chances are it's the Dura-ace one.

How did I do?

You really need to build that up again. You're too old to suffer from groupset-itis, (the irrational urge to have all your componentry supplied by one manufacturer). We've yet to see a nice retrobike where the brakes and brake levers don't even match. :)

Anyway, as much as I enjoy rooting around in you garage, I really must get on with identifying my frame. I KNOW you can help me. Here is three quotes I've dug up from the bowels of the internet:

"Holdsworthy company built frames for many shops around the country (and >especially so in the London area) and these frames often do not carry a >Holdsworth frame number. I have had a couple of Ken Ryall frames which were >Holdsworthy built but had a frame number specific to the shop whose >transfer they carried."

"During the time Dad (Stan Pike) was in business he also built for other UK businesses such as Don Farrell cycles, Ken Ryall cycles, Fred Baker cycles, to name just a few, these frames carried their respective dealers transfers."

"according to Barry Witcomb, bikes will be either a Holdsworth or Witcomb, rebadged, he did suggest that mine was a Witcomb bike because of the wrap around lug style on the top of the seat tube; although he never got round to verifying the exact origin, supposedly he can check the frame/fork number back to his 'records' "

If you remember Omegastrada's Stan Pike thread, the frame number on that Stan Pike was just like mine: K, two numbers for the year, three for number of frame that year, R. At first I thought I'd found the maker of my frame, but I asked myself "why the K and R?" That second quote above says Stan sometimes built for Ken Ryall, so I'm extrapolating from the evidence the following scenario:

Ken to Stan: "we need to order some frames"

Stan to Ken: "Sure, what number are you up to?"

Ken to Stan: "75011"

Stan to Ken: "ok I can build you 75012 but I'm going on holiday at the end of the week so the others will have to wait until I get back"

Ken to Stan: "No problem, we're in a bit of a rush but I'm sure we can get Witcombs or Holdsworth to do 75013, 4, 5, 6, and 7, have a nice holiday".

Do you think that's a fair facsimile of the framebuilding business mid '70's, or am I on totally the wrong track?
 
I love that Falcon too :)

just a quick post before sorting out the rubbish collection....damn council rubbish days.

I guess Torqueless knows a bit about 70's and the bikes that inhabited that era :) .........and the bits that went on them


The box of bits is exactly as you describe.....almost. The campag rear mech is a 72 (I think) nuovo record, drilled out and the bolts flattened and painted to look like the SABA titanium replacement items which I could never afford. The brake levers are spot on, the campag ones are the infamous globe ones which go for silly money LOL

The Seatpost is a Nuovo record and the drilled callipers are Weinmann 500's

The hub is an old racelite track hub from my grasstrack days :)

The bars / stem are the only fly in the ointment, the bars are Cinelli Giro D'Italia but the stem is a bit of an anomoly.

It's actually a Nitto which didn't sort of make it........I'll post a pic of the bolt which goes into a triangular plate. I got it from a rep :)

Spill the beans.......how come you know so much ?

Cheers

Shaun
 
I doubt I know anything that an anorak on the internet couldn't find out! :)

Apart from that, I'm 3 years younger than you, Midlife. I spent some of my teenage years riding my 30lb. 100% steel BSA Tour of Britain 'racer' the ten or twenty miles to the nearest decent bike shop, sometimes even on a sunday morning, just to look in the window. I remember waiting nervously in such a shop behind someone buying £200 worth of Super Record, me with my paper-round money in my back pocket. :oops:

I started buying 'cycling' weekly in 1975. I found out where the nearest shops were from the adverts at the back. I still remember my first issue of International Cycle Sport, november '76, with Freddy Maertens and Francesco Moser on the cover. Inside, a picture of Freddy and sidekick Michel Pollentier riding together in Grand Prix des Nations. Underneath them, a picture of Roy Schuiten on a red Lejeune and Moser on a gold Benotto. both photos taken early in the morning when it was still dark.

See, all this stuff is etched on my memory even 36 years later...sad but true... Who knows why?

I had to wait nine years before I got the funds to buy that secondhand 531. By then the peloton (and much else) was starting to get a bit tacky... lycra and plastic replacing wool and leather..I'd more or less lost interest around the time of Hinault/Lemond. I was never a competitive cyclist or even a club cyclist. Meanwhile I still got this frame, I won't use the word 'love', but there is definitely an emotional attachment there, along with such components as I've accumulated, some of which remain from my paper-round days.

So I got a bit of an eye for anything from back then, and of course I can recognise a decent frame of those days from fifty paces, like you can. It's like built in radar. :)
 
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