Going on 3 years since Francisco Cuevas died...the same day I received this gift from my friend Peter. The other 3 bikes he gave me have, I'm sure, all found good homes via the local co-op, but this one resides in my shed. Pushing 35 years old now, but still frisky and handles as much road as I can stand (though I do replace the all-aluminum freewheel for hilly rides)...Came assembled with almost all Zeus components except the hubs (and I've boxed up the original pedals just so I can use my regular riding shoes on some old clipless replacements)...handles 28mm tires...and that color is even cooler than it looks in these pictures.
So raise a glass to Sr. Cuevas for me this month... and read some more about him here...
4 comments:
Thanks for the link to my Francisco post.
I had to register with Google/Blogger to post, but I have no blog there.
My Cuevas also resides here on the west coast, I have seen only a couple since arriving here 30 years ago.
And I still have not seen any from the years that Francisco was working at 14th Street Bicycles. He probably made less than 50 while he was there, so I imagine it is unlikely that I ever will. Those frames were very different from the ones he made in later years. They varied more from frame to frame according to the wishes of the buyer. The later models like yours that I have seen are all very similar. This change seems to have come after Francisco worked for Paris Sport. I think he refined his style during that time.
All supposition on my part.
He sure was a great guy.
Greg --
Thanks for your response, and the original post. Cuevas was one of those names we in the industry all knew back then, but for us on this side of the continent it was only by reputation...From my foggy memory the sense was that half the racers on the East Coast were riding his bikes...probably apocryphal, but that's how I remember it.
Well, he wasn't all that well known in 1974, when I met him. He did know and build for a few racers, but not that many. But I think that after I left in 1977, he started to get a following. This may have come from the time he spent working at Paris Sport in Jersey. I'm not sure how long he was there before he started his own shop with his sons.
Recently there has been some discussion of his frames on Classic Rendezvous. There seems to be quite a few people with stories about Cuevas frames failing. Much of it is hearsay, but there appears to be a couple of guys who had their own frames fail.
Some are attributing the failures to the belief that Francisco cold set his frames after brazing. It is well known that he did not use jigs to align his frames during the brazing process. It was pretty amazing to watch. In thinking about it, I vaguely remember him doing a bit of adjusting to the frame after it was complete. But not very much, or it would stand out more clearly in my memory.
Most Cuevas owners I've talked to really like the frame. I know I do, and as I tend to repeat: thousands of miles on my frame, 3000 of them with 50 pounds of equipment and multiple crashes, without any kind of frame failure.
I don't buy the cold-set issue as a cause of failure (note my blissfully knowledge-free state regarding individual failures of Cuevas frames); steel frames get straightened and bent and straightened again all the time...
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