GP Wilson Dropouts
If you love these special touches that make Fats...read on ...
Courtesy of Mtbr.com
...perhaps I can interest you in reading a bit of the history I've managed to locate on G.P. Wilson and his desirable dropouts. Here's a bit of copy and paste, along with a link to read more:
On a related topic - those GP Wilson dropouts were damn nice looking bits of
gear - saw them on a Chris Chance once in the late 80's. Is there any
pictoral archives on the web of dropout designs? I'm historically
challenged, as you can tell, and feeling nostalgic.
Warwick Gresswell
Owner, and wacky designer/inventor of a
dime a dozen variety.
re:
Dear Hoppy,
The problem with GP (Buster Wilson) was that like my Dad, he only started
building again after he retired.
Buster not only built really wonderful dropouts, which I used several score of
in my custom frames, but also made a lot of experimental stuff, including paper
thin dropouts and paper thin lugs.Buster always used me as his R&D testbed."See
if this will work or see if you can use it." I can't to this day remember if I
every paid him for all the myriad of parts that he provided to me all those
years.
They were very thin and indestructible and more than rivaled anything from the
world market or the newly emerging products of Henry James Folson and
dramatically less than 1/2 the weight but most were never put into production.
George Buster Wilson was a very gregarious human being, a close family friend
and in his own personal bike club venue, generated a number of very fine
handling ultra lightweight bicycles. Buster never sought any promotion and only
worked his art within a very small portion of the bicycling community in San
Diego County.
It was long after his passing away that people were starting to realize what a
remarkable engineer/craftsman/and bicycle genius that he was. His practical
approach to bicycle alignment which was the result of the discovery of many
decades of friendship with my father and him discussing the inadequacies of jig
tooling for bicycle frame construction as compared to the aircraft and other
items that they both built in their day jobs.
Buster developed a jig which has never been fully understood or been copied or
rivaled since which allowed the operator to construct a perfectly aligned frame
each and every time, completely eliminating cold setting.
In regards to the dropouts, the one vertical dropout that did reach semi
production level made from 17/4 ph was a perfectly practical dropout that was
not only virtually indestructible was was very lightweight. As much as I love
Art Stump, his dropouts pale as far as usability to those that Buster made.
Both of these men were very close friends. Buster being Buster and Art being
Bud. Their lives have paralleled for many decades, at one point in time they
had machine shops making aircraft parts right next door to each other. A
different time, a different life, kinda of like what you and I enjoy when we go
out back to feed the tiger.
Freddy Parr
Gotta love the GP Wilsons
