Last frame of 2022 and another frame builder garage sale

Hugh Enochs built his first frame in 1961 when I was six years old. Now he is in a care facility with parkinson's and is no longer capable of working. This has left his wife with quite a task- figure out what to do with all of his accumulation from being in the bicycle business for a half century. These boxes of tubing represent a tiny fraction of what he has stored in the garage. I went there at the urging of one of my customers to maybe buy some materials left over from when Hugh was building frames . I took what I could- not all of it is useful but there's enough there that will be fun to turn into bike frames.

What you see here is a frame and fork made almost entirely with matrials from that garage sale. This is also the last frame of the year and a project that really does not have much of a reason to exist other than that between Christmas and new years I like to build a frame or two out of old materials in the manner I did when I first started 44 years ago. 

This frame and fork are meant to mimic the style of frame that was built in the '70's in  Italian prisons ( or so the legend says..) Brands such as Atala, Ideor ,Lygie and others were supposedly produced in prisons in Italy for export , mainly to the USA. These frames were not built with a lot attention to detail but they had their own sort of charm. I used a set of lugs I got off of Ebay for $ 14.00 and the tubing was out of the boxes in the photo. The fork crown was one I bought from the late Art Sump in about 1993-1994 , along with the BB shell. The dropouts are fairly modern and they can still be purchased from Nova cycles. The tubing however is very old, some of it from the '60's . There's a good chance that much of this stuff was old when Hugh got it. Frame building supplies tend to get passed down and some of the tubes have a very long wait to be utilized. Some times they never get used and wind up in recycling or landfill. I'm trying to use all the stuff I get, even if it means building something that has no purpose other than to just be a bike- a bike that will some day be much more useful than a pile of old tubes 

I'll be interested to see how this one rides. It is make for longer reach caliper brakes and up to a 700x35 tire. Maybe this one will see a little dirt........one can only hope. Happy new year, everyone.