1986 Club Fuji

My other bike frame, currently waiting to be built up.  I bought it late last year off of craigslist, hoping to put it together as a decent winter bike to ride through the salt. Oh well, the miyata's had to bear all of that abuse instead.  So I bought the club thinking it was a top quality fuji frame for $50.  It's a really cheap price, but after some digging around classicfuji.com, I found out it's really nothing special.  It's got quad-butted VALite Tubing, which I remembered from the old fuji Sagres I had that was stolen.  I can't really find any consensus online about the pedigree of this tubing, but if you read through the actual fuji catalog from 1982, you'll find this blurb:

*All Fuji adult 10, 12 and 18 speed bicycle frames are brazed either of butted or double butted VALite™, or of Chrome Molybdenum tubing. VALite™ is a Vanadium, Aluminum and Manganese alloy developed jointly by Fuji and one of the world's foremost bicycle tubing manufacturers. It has strength to weight properties far superior to ordinary bicycle tubing. Chrome Molybdenum is the material used by the world's most prominent custom builders for all-out competition bicycles and the finest touring bikes.

It doesn't help me conceptualize the quality of the tubing that much, but it does verify the alloy. Frankly, the fact that they compare VALite's performance qualities with "ordinary bicycle tubing" (I'm guessing high-tensile steel) hints that it's really a low to mid range quality.

On the other hand, the catalog sheet on my specific model has the weight clocking in at just under 23 lbs, which isn't so bad, considering the bottom of the line 10 speed Regis weighs more than 5 lbs more.