A turn of phrase. Sure, same parent company as Salsa and Surly etc but if they'd make a decent go of selling £1500 Taiwanese built framesets with moden acoutrements they wouldn't be putting it to bed. I have no idea on the factory gates pricing on such a frame but it seems the profit...
All City made steel frames mass produced at the most advanced steel bike building facility in the world (in Taiwan) and catered for discs, thru axles etc - and charged almost Mercian money - and still went under. So I don't buy the idea that everything framebuilding is tickety boo in the far east.
26.8 denotes it as Reynolds 501 - at least for the seat tube. Nice seat stays, internal cable routing..yeah its a nice rig.Geoffrey Butler were in the middle of lots of framebuilders and farmed work out. Roberts would have built some of their bikes but equally anybody from a dozen SE London...
Probably a bit of both..but the problem of skills retiring with their owners is a nationwide issue in the UK, our industrial base is thin. Anyone can put tubes together but when you bought a Mercian you were buying decades of accumulated skills. The average age of the workers there was very high...
Its to do with the clearances built into the frame. Those seatstays are further inbound than the more modern alu era cross bikes whic run tyres up to 40mm. Those 70s, 80s steel cross bikes its more like 32 max. Had this exact same issue with the same brakes when i used to race on an old Graham...
Any canti where you can angle the pad posts on a wider range will work. You want a low cost solution check these out.:
https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/brakes/0-suntour-selfenergising-se-cantilever-brakes-rear/
And if you want to go super nerdy, check out this Canti angle optomiser site...
Definitely. All the kit is there. Reasonable money for one of these I think. I see lots of Galaxy's and Super Galaxy's for stupid money, there was the hipster mini trend for full dress tourers that happened just before gravel. Still some silly sods want £400 for one.
Aside from the very nice rims I'm not seeng an amazing bargain here. Missing the nice to have braze ons to make touring...nicer. And then there is what looks like a dent in the seatstay.
You're buying for the rims. My inner tightwad says £80, tops.