Today's Bike Ride

[wheezing donkey]

The first run of Planet X Ti frames were Lynskey, the current ones are built by Van Nicholas - but badged as Planet X. Confusingly, they sometimes also stock Van Nicholas frames as well.

The original Ritchey Swiss Cross frames were all hand brazed by Tom Ritchey. The sample of the new one was also hand brazed by Tom Ritchey, but the production run is tig welded in Tawain. There was talk on another forum from someone at Ritchey that there may be a limited run of the new frame, but hand brazed by Tom.

Yes indeed; apologies to Hann! Just had a look at the road frame section of the Planet-X website and the Sportive frame depicted is definitely from a different batch than mine - they now have rear rack mounts (which I would have quite liked) and the weld quality definitely looks inferior to my Lynskey built frame - the shot of the seat cluster that depicts the rack mounts also displays some less than perfect welds (brake bridge / seat stay), not to mention the rather tacky looking Planet-X sticker on the seat tube.
Glad that I bought mine when I did ( 13 months ago )!
It's only a couple of months ago that I was looking at the same page of that website and they were singing the praises of the welding by the girls at Lynskey!! Which they are not doing now.
Dom, there are some excellent frame builders / tig welding contractors in Taiwan and if they are being endorsed by Tom Ritchey, the product should be excellent. Just a pity that Tange are not still producing their excellent range of cro-mo tube sets.