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I don't know a lot about bikes and bought this frame about 5 years ago in Montreal. It was repainted and looks like an old touring frame. It is very light steel, very low (close to the ground), doesn't have the original fork (1") and the bottom bracket had to be ordered from an italian manufacturer.

The photos are not great, but as I didn't know what to shoot exactly, I thought I'd give it a try.

Can someone help identify this frame?

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    Probably a normal road bike, not a touring bike, given that it doesn't have rack mounts, just fender eyelets. My intuition is late 80s/early 90s, based on 7 speeds and downtube shifters.
    – Jamie A
    Commented Aug 11, 2017 at 18:43
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    Clearly it's a Campy (Campagnolo) frame, as that's what's stamped on the dropout. As expected for Campy, it's a good quality frame -- forged dropouts, very nice lugs on the frame joints, well-considered cable routing. Nice components too, though some may have been replaced. A little hard to guess the date, but probably around 1985. Commented Aug 11, 2017 at 18:49
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    Campagnolo sold dropouts to other frame manufacturers though, didn't they? The same way Reynolds or Columbus made/make tubes, not whole bikes.
    – Jamie A
    Commented Aug 11, 2017 at 18:57
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    As far as I know there are no Campagnolo frames, but they did manufacture dropouts for frame builders. Since you can't downvote commenents, I'll just call bullshit on that one. The lack of shifter bosses and recessed brake mounting nuts would date this to 1980s, from lack of engravings and small serial number I'd give credit to some of the many, many small frame builder companies.
    – ojs
    Commented Aug 13, 2017 at 16:59
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    @Criggie note the Campagnolo crank with otherwise Shimano components and MTB pedals with spikes on road bike. Blasphemy!
    – ojs
    Commented Aug 13, 2017 at 17:02

1 Answer 1

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Back in the day, the quick way to tell the road-race style bikes from the road-tour bikes was to look at the wheel clearance. The race bikes would have very little clearance (~1cm) between the rear wheel and the frame, and the touring bikes tended to have closer to 5cm.

This is why from a distance it looks like a touring frame, but up close you can see that the positioning screws in the rear dropouts are missing, and the wheel settles into a location much further back than it should. You can see the scratches in the dropout from the original wheel position. You might want to replace those screws.

In any case, it's not a touring bike.

The Italian BB thread is a big clue. According to https://www.sheldonbrown.com/cribsheet-bottombrackets.html there were a few French makers that used Italian threads as well.

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