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Originally Posted by rallizes
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That was a very polite reply from Mike at No. 22. Given the terms on which the team from Serotta/Saratoga Frameworks parted, I would be shocked (no pun intended) that they would be willing to build anything for Ben.
The things that set a Legend apart from other ti bikes are all of the refined processes (butting, swaging, complex machining, etc.). Serotta has been vindicated in that virtually all of those refinements can be found in one builder’s bikes or another—but there is no builder that has combined all of the refinements of a Legend in a single frame.
These frames seem to be in a similar boat. Perhaps they are as close as one is going to get to a modern-day Legend, but the rear triangle looks fairly generic, and probably needs to be to deal with disc brake forces. The swaging on the downtubes has the “baseball” effect of early Legends/Ottrotts. Perhaps the shaping is done by a different process, and the gradual taper isn’t as easy to achieve(?).
The external rear brake cable is a deal-breaker for me. I recall Serotta having concerns about holes for internal cable routing with the triple-butted tubes bitd, and I hope they can figure this out with their current tubesets. From what I have heard, companies like Moots and Seven were losing sales to boutique builders who offered options like anodization, internal cable routing, etc., and they finally got on the bandwagon (or at least partially).
A limited run of 100 bikes makes no sense to me, either. Frankly, these look like advanced prototypes to me, and I’d hope that the second 100 are better than the first.
I own an embarrassing number of Serottas, and I have a lot of respect for what Ben has created in the past. Sadly, these bikes don’t excite me, and the puffery of his sales literature is tiresome. I wish Ben every success, but if this is what the first 100 bikes look like, I’ll wait for the next batch.