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mobiles to pay much attention to bicycles and bicycle racing.

The most recent demonstration of Schwinn's continued support for bicycle racing came in 1974 when the Amateur Bicycle League (now the United States Cycling Federation), the governing body of amateur U.S. cycling at the time, allowed sponsorship of amateur riders. Schwinn presently provides sponsorship for five different amateur racing clubs across the country, one of which is the Wolverines (now called the Wolverine—Schwinn Sports Club) which has provided Schwinn with champions such as Sheila Young, Sue Novara, and Roger Young, all of whom ride Schwinn Paramounts. (Before the sponsorship, Sheila Young rode a Cinelli track bicycle and Sue Novara rode a Pogliaghi.)

Building Philosophy

When Schwinn began building its standard-line Paramount bicycles in the 1950s, Nervex lugs were used. Twenty years later, Schwinn is still building the Paramounts with Nervex lugs. In the 1950s, the Nervex lug was the most popular design as well as a quality product. Today, the fashion is the smooth, simple Italian-type lug. As a result, Schwinn has been seriously thinking about changing. Like other changes that Schwinn makes, however, it has to be carefully researched and developed. Schwinn is interested in more than the overall finish of the lug. They are primarily concerned with accuracy of internal diameters, maintenance of the angles, and the quality of the threading and facing of the bottom brackets.

Schwinn used cast lugs in the 1930s when the first six-day frames were made but the lugs were sand castings, which resulted in rough, pitted finishes. The casting process has been greatly improved since then and Schwinn is presently looking at some investment cast lugs, bottom brackets, and fork crowns only because the castings are able to achieve fine definition that requires less hand finishing.

Various fork crowns are used on the Paramounts: on the road, a pressed steel Nervex crown; on the track, a forged Japanese crown; and on the tandem, a specially machined crown out of a solid block of steel. Although Schwinn is considering using cast fork crowns on the Paramounts, they believe that it is not necessary since the weakest part of the fork is the blades. If

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engineering were the only consideration, Brilando would probably use a heavier-gauge fork blade than a cast fork since he believes "an ideally designed fork should give uniformly throughout."

Most of the forks that Schwinn uses are preraked at Reynolds to Schwinn's specifications. Schwinn furnishes Reynolds with a drawing indicating the exact dimensions needed. The fork rakes currently used are:

1.l3/8 inches on the track frames;

2.1.75 inches on the road frames;

3.1.5 inches on the criterium frames,

Interestingly, l3/4-inch fork rakes are used on both the touring and the road racing models. Until recently, the touring bicycles used a 2-inch fork rake but laboratory tests confirmed that 0.25 inch less gave the tourist a more stable and safer ride.

Schwinn was probably one of the first builders to use the large 5/8-inch stays on their standard frames. According to Brilando, with 5/8-inch seatstays "you can get greater lightness as well as stiffness by using a lighter-gauge tube."

The Paramounts incorporate a seatstay attachment that is chamfered with small pieces of metal used to cap the seatstays. Other seatstay clusters have been considered but all were rejected on the belief that there is no advantage of adding extra weight in this area by using top eyes or wraparounds, which require heavy fixtures to give their neat appearance. Schwinn's analysis found that some of the so-called lightweight fastback stays use a heavy piece of metal built into the lug to allow an adequate brazing surface. As Frank Brilando sees it, "People try and save weight in the tubing and they add weight on the seat lug! That doesn't make sense. I would rather see that weight put into the tubing to give you overall frame stiffness than something just for cosmetics."

All Paramounts (road, track, tandem, custom) are built on jigs. There are only two brazers, Lucille and Wanda, who work on the Paramounts. They are probably the only women in the industry who braze top-quality frames! Lucille and Wanda have been brazing Paramounts for more than 25 years and they do an extraordinary job using a small flame and the lowest possible temperature. They have learned to control the torch to keep the tubes as cool as possible during the brazing process to maintain

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Figure 17-1: Ferenc Makos, at an aligning table, makes sure the Paramount frame is perfectly aligned and straight.

the tube's physical properties. Silver solder is used for braze primarily to minimize overheating the tubing. With the lower temperature required to braze with the silver, it is possible to rigidly hold the frame in a jig and expect minimal distortion in the frame. "If a braze with a higher melting point was used and everything was jigged and held rigidly, there would be no room for expansion of parts," Brilando claims. "With our system of

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heavier straight gauge tubing, the expansion and contraction of the tubing is minimized.

Working together with the two brazers are two other frame builders who perform the actual assembling of frames. They work from specifications; cut, miter, and flux all the tubes; and accurately assemble the entire frame in the jig. After the setup is complete, the frame is brazed by either Lucille or Wanda. The majority of the tubes for the standard Paramounts are mitered on a special milling lathe. However, on the custom frames, the majority are hand-mitered because it is faster and easier to hand-miter than it is to reset the lathe.

If any one aspect of the building process was singled out as the most important, Frank Brilando believes he would have to choose the brazing process.

The brazing is more important than the mitering. Still, I don't know how you can separate them. You can have a poorly mitered tube and a good braze job and nobody would know the difference provided you've got a rigid lug because the body of the lug is so much greater than the tube that you'll never see. Any failures will always go beyond the lug on the tube. If you have a good sturdy lug, the fitting of the tubes isn't going to be that critical. I think that a lot is overemphasized because the joint of the tube is so minimal compared to the strength of a lug. If you have very thin lugs, then I would say that the mitering becomes very important.

Frank believes that unless someone has a lot of experience brazing, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that you have a good joint, because it is difficult to know whether the braze has gone all the way into the joint. There are many things that Frank believes are important: proper preparation of the joint, cleaning it properly, fitting up the joint, getting the right heat to sweat-in the braze; but these are all things that you cannot see by looking at the frame. Consequently, the reputation of the builder becomes the primary guide to whether you have a good frame or not.

After the frames are built, they are checked for alignment. Even with the careful precision with which Schwinn builds its

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Paramounts, there can be a small amount of warpage that occurs in the hangar bracket. In order to realign the frame, the bottom bracket is retapped. The outer face of the bottom bracket is then faced off, after which a precision cone and Jocknut is screwed into the bottom bracket. This cone and locknut fits on a fixed mandrel on a precision aligning table. The frame is aligned (cold set) to the threads themselves in the bottom bracket.

Schwinn uses a process similar to sandblasting, called glass beading, to clean the frame and prepare it for painting. It resembles sandblasting except that it uses a much finer material which is less likely to score the frame. The Paramount frames are painted with the standard Schwinn paint used on the other Schwinn production frames. The only difference is that the Paramounts are all hand-sprayed whereas the production frames are done electrostatically. The translucent finishes receive a primer, silver, and final coat. The opaque finishes receive only a primer and topcoat.

When a custom order is received, it is sent to the product design area where Charles "Spike" Shannon, Paramount designer, reviews it and lays out the dimensions on the drafting board to make sure that there are no design problems. If there is a problem, Spike will work with the customer, resolving any difficulties. There have been times, of course, when he has been unable to convince the customer and has refused an order because he thought it was unsound. Schwinn has the ability to give the customer exactly what he wants. The wait for a custom order can vary from one to four months depending on the time of year. Custom tandem orders do not take any longer since all custom orders go right into rotation as they are received.

Schwinn's Paramount production is very small. Out of one million Schwinn frames that are built each year, only 800 are Paramounts. The majority of Schwinns manufactured are the lugless, flash-welded models (which, in fact, are not lugless at all, because they have a head lug and bottom bracket lug that are flash-welded together). As required by the flash-welding process, heavier-walled welded tubing is used. Consequently, these bicycles are durable but heavy.

A number of Schwinn models have also been built in Japan to Schwinn's specifications. These bicycles have been the production lugged frame models which Schwinn was not equipped to produce when their popularity skyrocketed with the bicycle boom

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Frame Selection

During the 1950s, Schwinn started building road racing Paramounts and, like the track bicycles, they were only built on a custom basis. Schwinn miscalculated the popularity of the Paramounts because when the demand increased in the 1950s, Schwinn was not equipped to handle it and had to hire Oscar Wastyn, Sr., to help build some of the Paramounts. Oscar learned how to build bicycles from his father (Emil) and took over his father's small bicycle store and frame-building shop which is still located near the Schwinn factory today. Now the store is operated by the third generation of cycling Wastyns, Oscar Wastyn, Jr.

With the many custom orders Schwinn was getting for the road Paramount, it was time to incorporate the Paramount into the standard Schwinn line. By 1956, all the bicycles supplied to the U.S. Olympic Cycling Team were built by Schwinn using Reynolds 531DB tubing and Campagnolo equipment. (Schwinn had used Accles and Pollack tubing before World War II, but it was not available in the 1950s.) Schwinn had conducted years of research and testing and by 1956 concluded that the best racing materials were made by TI Reynolds and Campagnolo. To this day, most of the Paramounts are still being built with Reynolds 531DB tubing and equipped with Campagnolo components.

In 1958, the Paramount road bicycle became a standard model in the Schwinn line. The standard Paramount was designed to fit the size requirements of 99 percent of the population. For riders with specific requirements, Schwinn has continued to build custom Paramounts for road or track use.

When the Paramount road-racing model first became part of the Schwinn standard line, it did not reflect the designs of the ordinary racing bicycle. Schwinn was one of the first builders to use steep angles on road bicycles. (In the 1950s, all road bicycles had much shallower angles.) Schwinn believed that since the American roads were so smooth, a road bicycle should be designed more along track lines for better, more responsive handling.

Frank Brilando, vice-president in charge of engineering, has been with Schwinn since 1951. His credentials are extensive, including a berth on the 1948 and 1952 U.S. Olympic teams. He believes that Schwinn can satisfy almost every taste and need. If

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