Busted Resurrectio Lug/WTB: 64cm Sam or other Riv frame

[Mike S]

Damn y'all, busted the headtube lug on my restored 1986ish Trek 520
today. Picture of the carnage available here: http://imgur.com/FbafN

I noticed the fork felt really shaky when cornering for a few days,
maybe a week, and when it felt unsafely, 'bout-to-blow shaky after a
short ride today, I checked it out to notice a crack running all
around the headtube lug. It managed to make it home the 3 miles I
needed to get home, but sadly, my reclamation project and it's $300
powdercoat are headed for the scrapyard.

Given the exuberant faith we all have in lugged steel, I thought this
bike would surely last me a decade and many thousands of miles, hence
the steep powdercoat investment. Unfortunately, I am now down a frame
that has all kinds of fancy Rivvish parts attached to it. I have a
Quickbeam as my other ride, but I am now looking to upgrade to a
Rivendell road frame.

I feel foolish for not just saving up for a new Sam in the first
place, and you can tell I was pining for one by the copycat orange
powdercoat. Alas, I am looking to get (ideally) a used 64cm Sam to
replace this, but I'm also interested in any tall Atlantis or Rambo or
Redwood or other stout-enough-for-touring Rivendell frames that might
be out there. I'm sure the Waterford 64 that RBW sells is sweet, but
the $450 markup over Taiwanese is a little rich for my blood.

SO, I would love to hear about any tall-person Rivendell frames that
might be out there for sale. Sorry to abuse any illusions that lugged
steel is indestructible, too!

[Steve Palincsar]

On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 15:12 -0700, Mike S wrote:
>
> I noticed the fork felt really shaky when cornering for a few days,
> maybe a week, and when it felt unsafely, 'bout-to-blow shaky after a
> short ride today, I checked it out to notice a crack running all
> around the headtube lug. It managed to make it home the 3 miles I
> needed to get home, but sadly, my reclamation project and it's $300
> powdercoat are headed for the scrapyard.
>

I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but it is worth pointing out that
this is a perfect example of the best possible way for a fork to fail:
gradual, with plenty of warning.

[cyclot...@gmail.com]

That sucks, but cool picture! Glad you're ok. You can see on the
crack how it's progressed over time. I'm presuming that from right to
left, where it's dark/old rust that's been there a while then the
orange/fresh rust part is more recent, and finally the silverish part
the final catastrophic crack.

[James Warren]

Mike,
What size was your Trek and what size non-sloping TT bike do you ride? I think the largest those Treks came in was my size, 64 cm.

But sizing is different on the Sam. My Trek touring and Rambouillet size is 64 cm. However, the 60 cm Sam fits me just right. This is because the 6 degrees of TT upslope compared to 2 degrees of the Ram effectively adds 4 cm of height to the headtube. When the TT is around 60 cm long, every degree of extra TT upslope angle adds 1 cm to the vertical position of the head lug. That's the theory of it, and in practice, it works for me. I have a 64 Ram, a 64 Atlantis, and a 60 Sam, and they all fit about the same.

So if the 64 Trek fit you well, maybe a 60 cm Taiwanese Sam is your size. When the Sams originally came out, this different "expanded" method of sizing was meant to fit people up to about my height (6'4") and only using 4 model sizes to do it with 60 cm being the largest. (It has since grown to 5 sizes, adding in the 64 cm to accomodate the really tall people. A 64 Bombadil or Sam should be like a 68 Atlantis.)

But ask someone at Rivendell.

-Jim W.

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[Mike On A Bike]

And the front view of the crack: http://imgur.com/q6yWP

[Mike On A Bike]

Jim,

Thanks for the informative reply on Sam-sizing. The Trek and the
Quickbeam I ride are both 64cm, but I feel I should go up to the max
with a Sam, being that my saddle height is 85cm, which puts me in the
65-67cm standard frame size on Rivendell's chart. I have about 16cm of
seatpost exposed on my 64's and I needed the Nitto lugged seatpost to
get the right reach, with a DirtDrop stem maxed out for bar height.

So, I would LOVE for a 60cm Taiwanese Sam to fit me well, but I am
concerned about undersizing given those issues. That being said, if I
understand your theory right, and a 60cm Sam would effectively fit
like a 66cm standard frame, I'd be all about it. Also, what is your
saddle height? I'd be interested to know, because maybe with the parts
I've already used to adapt a maybe-too-small 64 frame, the 60cm Sam
would work with those adjustments.

I emailed Keven today to begin to get my head around all of these
issues, and I'm sure I'll be well taken care of by Rivendell.

On Oct 25, 8:31 pm, James Warren <jimcwar...@earthlink.net> wrote:

[pruckelshaus]

I have never seen a frame crack that way.

[Jim Thill - Hiawatha Cyclery]

I've seen one other frame crack that way (more or less), and... It was a Hillborne! The story behind the headline was that the rider had less finesse and more unbridled raw power than anyone I've ever seen ride a bike. He never rode an inch without either sprinting hard out of the saddle or mashing the brakes. Every ride, no matter how casual, was abusive in the extreme to his bicycle frame and every component. When he came in with a cracked headtube in his rather newish Sam, we were not terribly shocked.

[tarik saleh]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 11:08 AM, pruckelshaus <prucke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have never seen a frame crack that way.
>
>

Lots of frames break that way, they usually don't go quite that long
before discovery. But if you take any normal steel frame break and let
it go for a long time it will propagate all the way around the
tube/joint eventually. Lug-tube interface is a nice place to have a
crack start, especially if they are poorly brazed, or if they are
otherwise not well made (overcooked, missing brazing material, etc.) .
I had a lugged track bike that almost dropped the bottom bracket into
the road while riding it. It was a very flexy frame anyway and was
covered in ice and mud when it happened, so it was not completely
obvious what was going on, I thought I had a loose crank interface
when it got bad, felt just like a precessing crank until I stood up on
a climb and the bike started going sideways... I actually had repaired
this frame before due to a crack in the headtube in the tube next to
the lug. I caught that one pretty early.

http://www.tariksaleh.com/bike/bones/crack.html

But steel frames actually break fairly often, and if you let them go
for a while, the cracks look just like that, through the tube into and
out of the lug.

Tarik

--
Tarik Saleh
tas at tariksaleh dot com
in los alamos, po box 208, 87544
http://tariksaleh.com
all sorts of bikes blog: http://tsaleh.blogspot.com

[Tim McNamara]

The joints for the fork blades into the crown, the steerer into the crown and the lower head tube joint are the most stressed places on a bike. Bumps and braking apply a lot of stress to that area. Stress risers need to be minimized there and not overheating the metal during brazing is critical. A break in the fork or lower head joint is not so safe no matter what material used in making the frame.

Oddly enough IME it's not the most common place for break to occur in steel frames. I've seen more cracks in the seat tube just above the bottom bracket and one of the chain stays at the BB. I think overheating the metal during brazing is common there due to the mass of the BB shell needing to be heated to get full flow of the brass or silver throughout the joint. If you sight down along the seat tube or down tube to the BB shell, you can often see some distortion of the tubes from overheating. When you are standing to sprint or climb, you're putting a large tension load on the seat tube-BB shell joint as well as a bending load. The flex of the BB shell also puts a bending load on the chain stay- BB shell joints.

It'd be interesting to rig some bikes up with strain gauges and see what the measurable differences in frame flex are; in the interest of discussing "planing" (a term I react to negatively for some reason) it would be interesting to see if measured dynamic flex matches the subjective impressions that lead to preferring one bike over another.

[Jim]

Hi Mike:

I have almost that exact bike on order right now. It's a 64cm Sam,
with the lugged seatpost, and rather than the Dirt Drop, they now
carry an extra long Nitto "Talllux" stem. My SH is 89cm, and my
current road bike is a 66 cm 1971 Schwinn Super Sport, which gets me
to 88cm with the seat post maxed out. The bars are about 2cm below
where I want them, and the Riv folks told me that this bike will allow
me to get them where I want them. Keven has been working with me on
it, so he should have good answers to your questions. I'm really
looking forward to the delivery, will let you know how it fits when I
get it.

Jim

[Mike On A Bike]

HA! Funny to hear a Hillborne suffered a similar fate. I don't think
I'm particularly aggressive or abusive, and the most likely cause of
failure was this being a random frameswap with a friend who got it for
free on craigslist, so god knows what kind of treatment it got in it's
heyday. Lost an 80's Raleigh Grand Prix with chrome fork blades in
that trade that I bet will be rocking Portland for another decade...

I think I've seen past my retrothrifty grouch limitations and will
instead splurge for the Waterford 64cm Sam Hillborne to replace this.
I briefly wrestled with going to the Surly darkside for a 70%
discount, but with my weird proportions and fixation on having another
piece of (Now MUSA!) Rivendell beautility/sculpture, it just seems
like the only way to go.

Once you drink the Petersen Kool-Aid, it's really hard to break from
the RBW way. Bigass frames, skyhigh stems, magnificent lugwork, low
BB's, the whole gleaming freakin' package. This style/design of riding
really has changed my life in the best of ways, most importantly in
making not operating a car in a sprawly Southern city not only
possible, but positively enjoyable; emphasis on da Joy.

I think the broke-beat-busted-but-not-disgusted Trek frame is going to
make a great piece of artwork too though. Cant decide whether to saw
off the fork/headtube and mount it in the living room, or let it
gracefully rust away as garden decor.

On Oct 27, 2:52 am, Jim Thill - Hiawatha Cyclery <thill....@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Tim McNamara]

On Oct 27, 2011, at 5:17 AM, Mike On A Bike wrote:

> Once you drink the Petersen Kool-Aid, it's really hard to break from
> the RBW way. Bigass frames, skyhigh stems, magnificent lugwork, low
> BB's, the whole gleaming freakin' package.

LOL! Although when I discovered Bridgestone and then when Rivendell came along my thought was "wow, someone who thinks about bike sort of like I do." But then I am of the same generation as Grant, which might have something to do with it.