Frame Alignment & Respacing is a wonderful way to save vintage steel bikes and help upgrade and modernize them for today’s ridding styles. You may already know this, or you may not so here are some photos of a beautiful vintage Bruce Gordon I did. The customer wanted to upgrade the vintage Campagnolo 5 speed drive train. So he contacted me. After talking about options, he shipped the frame for me to inspect and respace.

The bike was originally spaced at 120mm for the vintage five speed freewheel hub. I bolted it to my special alignment table and carefully cold set the rear stays five mm each until the rear spacing was at 130mm. This is the “modern” rear spacing for quick release road hubs. Next, I carefully aligned the rear dropouts back into parallel phase so that they would hold and tension the rear hub and bearings evenly.

He also had me inspect the headset and bottom bracket to ensure there would be no problems. The headset was perfect, but I checked it for size and made sure there was no damage, and everything was faced and reamed correctly for modern standard headsets.

He was concerned about gunk in the bb shell. I could have charged him $$$ to run taps through the threads, but didn’t think it was necessary, instead I cleared them out with a wire brush and some degreaser. Then installed a bottom bracket to make sure everything was fine.

While we were at it, I checked the clearance for 650b wheels and tires in case he wanted to go that route.

The bike is so pretty that I have to include lots of pictures I took of it, including some of the respacing and drop out alignment shots.