Re: 1987 Ritchey Ultra
Coquitlam Geoff":2vqjeh91 said:
Its a beauty I have a 89 Ultra. The seat post/seat post stays are fillet brazed, by Tom, then the frame was 'tacked up" etc and a production welder would have done the tig welding to finish.
Well done!
Thanks, I am looking forward to examining everything in detail when I take it apart to clean it up. We have a lot of warm weather coming up, I have a feeling it may get ridden again before that happens!
I didn't realize the Ultra frames were tig welded in-house. I have an oddball Ascent that has brazing where you mentioned, but is also brazed where the chainstays meet the BB shell. It has different tubing though, with the blue 4130 decal. For me the Ascent is an overlooked gem, although you could say the same about the Ultra to some degree. Either bike can be obtained for fairly small money, especially outside ebay.
Another curiosity is the lack of any 'Ultra' decal on the top tube. It's the same with my Ascent and Timber Comp-no decal. With most of the 1987 Ritchey catalog missing from the database (AAAAAuuuuughhhhh there has to be one somewhere!), it's hard to know if that's typical or not. I assume my Ascent is an '87 because the frame came with an XT 730 front mech. The '86 catalog shows top tube decals for the Ascent and Ultra, but not the Timber Comp. Funny to go with decals one year and none the next. I'd go by pictures of bikes on the database, but that can get confusing-not every owner knows the frame year with complete accuracy.
Oh well, half the fun of this is trying to understand long-forgotten logic. I work for a small, kind of old-school manufacturer. We get busy making and selling things. Some ideas about tracking products don't work as well as planned, and the reasoning gets lost to time surprisingly quickly. I'm just happy the database exists.
