We’re in a seemingly new era of bicycle framebuilding with the proliferation of 3D-printed components. While this movement might feel “unprecedented,” a similar thing happened with framebuilders in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s with technology borrowed from the Beretta gun manufacturer in Italy.
In what has to be one of our most intriguing Vintage Bicycles articles to date, John hops on a phone call with Tom Ritchey to discuss a rare 1990 Eisentraut mountain bike that Tom had recently acquired and the technology that made it possible.
Thanks for meeting with me today, Tom. I know you’re busy, so let’s get to it. But before we talk about this 1990 Eisentraut Mountain Bike, how did you and Albert first meet?
I look at Albert as the guy who passed the baton to Peter Johnson and me. As well as other builders. Early on, when Pete and I were racing and building and constantly trying to one-up each other by being competitive and feisty, we got in a car and drove up to Eisentraut’s shop.
Just to drop in to see if he’d sell us some Columbus tubing and let us poke around his shop.
It was a dingy, kind of dirty warehouse in Oakland. And wasn’t much in terms of the kind of image that you see these days. It was scrappy. What it did was it showed me at that age – and I think I was probably 16 – is that as shop could be scrappy and you could still put out very nice product.
I already had images in my mind of what shops looked like. A dirt floor shop in England or Italy and these other places you’d see in magazines. There was an occasional picture of some guy using a horizontal table and building a frame on a horizontal table.
One of the first things I noticed about Albert is that he was building frames vertically. He was doing things the way I was doing it – how I had taught myself to do – so I was really pleased to see what I thought was a more intelligent, innovative, nontraditional way. He was doing it like I was, how it made sense for him to make a frame.
Albert was an innovator of the vertical framebuilding jig that we’re accustomed to seeing now.
At that time he must have been 20 years older than me and he he was very willing to show what he was doing to me and Pete and we kind of had our eyes opened to what true production looked like.
So, I guess I’m just curious. What made you want that Eisentraut mountain bike?
For the most part, Eisentraut was locked into lugs and until I saw this mountain bike, I had never seen anything other than a lugged Eisentraut. So for me it was very unique. According to others, he built many more but I’ve never seen the many more.
All I’ve seen is this one.
I thought it proved he had the skill set to build outside the box.
This bike is extra special because it was hung up and dressed with a bunch of my parts – Ritchey parts – and that was just icing on the cake.
1984 Annapurna Competition with bilam, aka ‘lugless’, construction.
There’s an Eisentraut article in Bicycle Guide where he talked about making a tandem for himself and his wife. One of the things that that initiated a lot of my lugless construction [bilaminate construction Tom was famous for] was the desire to build a tandem.
I built my first tandem in 1974. And of course, you can’t use lugs with a tandem. Your freedom to do all the sorts of things that you want to do, whether it be working with various tubing diameters or specs with lugless construction opens up your world.
So the idea of building a tandem was a novel idea if you knew how to build a bike with fillet brazing.
Anyway, the main thing is that there was the traditional bike and then there was the untraditional bike, whether it be a tandem or a mountain bike, or a oversize tubed track bike or criterium bike, or a unique bike for a seven-foot-two man who needed something that was larger than any tubing could be made for.
Two 1980 Ritchey mountain bike frames that exemplify lugless construction…
There were just all these unique problems that I wanted to solve that were only possible with lugless construction. I wanted to find solutions to make custom stems, not just not just the mountain bike, but other things that were unlocked by going the untraditional route without lugs.
I think what’s really interesting about the Eisentraut is it’s using investment cast pieces in a very similar manner to which modern builders are using 3D printed stainless steel and titanium frame pieces right now. The bottom bracket and chainstay yoke and the fork crown carry the same design language. And that’s to me, that’s what’s stood out the most about the bike was like, wow, this is an innovation made by a guy known for lugged construction, and it’s a mountain bike on top of that!
Well, the investment cast thing was floating around a lot in the 80s. Italy was where the framebuilders discovered investment casting. I visited Columbus tubing in 1983, and Antonio knew that I was really interested in investment casting because that was another way to solve problems in a different way. You could unlock solutions to unique problems in bike designs. Do you know where he took me to show where the Italians learned how to design investment casting?
Where?
The Beretta gun factory.
It was one of these cold winter days; we drove up to… I forgot the name of the town! [Editor’s note: It was Gardone.]
Anyway, it was north of Milan, in the lower foothills of the Alps. We were looking at these gun castings, and in the mix, I began to notice all these lugs. And I recognized them! They were lugs used by Gios, Masi, and others. The Italian bike industry retooled this technology to another level of frame building that didn’t exist when I started out in the early 1970s.
[Editor’s note: Beretta later wholly adopted CNC manufacturing, actually buying a CAD/CAM/CIM machining company, MI-VAL, in 1976 before implementing the technology into its production in the mid-1980s. Beretta still owns MI-VAL.]
Meanwhile, back in Oakland. Outside of Albert’s shop’s backdoor – in an industrial area – there was a precision casting company.
And the shop was more than happy to work with bike people. This all happened at a pivotal time with the construction of mountain bikes. We were all looking at our choices. Ritchey used no lugs, Bridgestone and the Japanese were using lugs. And then there was the Italians, who didn’t want anything to do with the mountain bike.
To the Italians, it was sacrilegious almost for them to put one ounce of credibility or interest in the mountain bike. And the only guy who did was Antonio. He has always been avant-garde and he saw the potential of something that was that was really important to the business because he and his team must have been reading some Financial Times or something that I wasn’t reading or no one was reading in the States.
And they were.
And they were looking at they were looking at the challenges ahead.
Anyway, the main thing I’m I’m trying to give you an idea about is if you look back at that time and you looked at whether Specialized or the Japanese or anyone making production bikes in great numbers in the United States, none of them had taken the step of efficiency that the BMX world had taken and gone tig-welded. But the Italians had figured out lugged construction in mass-produced numbers with investment cast lugs.
All those Italian factories were huge, and they were pumping out more bikes and better bikes than ever before, all because of investment casting.
They were on top of a huge evolution.
While I was making my fillet brazed, high-end mountain bikes, Masi came along and got ride of the external lugs, oversize their tubes, and created this internal and hidden investment cast frame pieces. So you could join these massive tubesets and hide the seams.
This was their new signature look. It was revolutionary. 1985, I believe. I think it was called the Masi Criterium. [Editor’s note: it was the 1984 Masi 3V Volumetrica, above].
You’d look at the bike and go, where’s the lugs? This was where the whole world of cycling was going. Masi, to their credit, took a big, huge leap. They oversized the tubes and made them a little thinner and then used these hidden investment cast lugs. The Italians were jumping into all kinds of new things at that point in time.
So in the early 1990s, Albert built this frame, combining technologies developed by the Italians, marrying investment cast yokes, with tig-welding, and in a lot of ways, prototyping what could have been a mass-produced model in 1990s mountain bike designs. Wow.
Yeah, it’s it’s pretty special.
Fergus from Ritchey chimes in here: Tom, you mentioned when you first saw the bike that you saw your own design influence in there, like how the rear brake cable passes over the top tube and down at the seat binder, the park bench cable routing at the bottom bracket, the kind of flat crown unicrown fork, and ovalizing the seat tube at the bottom bracket…
Tom’s signature ovalized seat tube at the bottom bracket added lateral stiffness and spread out the surface area contact…
True, there are some similarities, but you know, I didn’t invent anything. I just took ideas that were out in nature and in other people’s court and put two and two together. I just played around with some of my own ideas but truthfully, I ended up being the hardest working guy out there.
And that’s really what it all comes down to: How hard do you want to work?
Many, many thanks to the man himself, Tom Ritchey, Fergus the facilitator, and you for reading this article. Part of our motivation for documenting Vintage Bicycles is telling their stories, and this one delivered on all fronts.
Going into the MADE Bike Show, where countless builders will display 3D sintered/printed frame components, it’s important to contextualize these movements in time, further pointing to the fact that no one has truly invented anything. It’s all building upon history…
1990 Albert Eisentraut Mountain Bike
Build Spec:
Year: 1990
S/N: E161990
Frame: Eisentraut
Fork: Eisentraut
Stem: Salsa Moto Roller
Headset: Ritchey Logic
Bottom Bracket: Shimano XT
Handlebar: Ritchey Logic
Shifters: Shimano Deore XT M730
Front Derailleur: Shimano Deore XT M700
Rear Derailleur: Shimano Deore XT M730
Brake Levers: Ritchey Logic
Front Brake: Ritchey Logic
Rear Brake: Ritchey Logic
Crankset: Ritchey Logic
Chainrings: Ritchey Logic
Pedals: Shimano XT
Hubs: Shimano Deore XT
Rims: Mavic MA2
Tires: Specialized Ground Control
Wheel QR: Ringle
Seatpost: Ritchey
Saddle: Avocet Touring
Seatpost QR: Ringle
Grips: Ritchey
Cogs: 7-speed Shimano XT
Chain: KMC 8 Speed