Meeting The Man, Keith Lippy

Tuesday, I received a call from Philip.  "Don't you have a Lippy tandem?  I've heard that Keith Lippy is doing the POMG Cross Vermont Tour this week." We do, indeed, have a Lippy that we purchased nine years ago from its original owner and which is the hands-down favorite of the many tandems we have owned.  Later in the day, after spending some time looking at the route they were to take, I got a call from Todd, who was one of the tour leaders, telling me the same thing.  Together, we hatched a plan to surprise Keith with a visit from one of his creations.

After the Thursday Eastern Tandem Rally ride, Jeanne and I drove over to Waitsfield, parking at the school.  We rode the tandem the mile from there to the B&B where the POMG group was staying.  Todd greeted us, then went up to get Keith, giving him a fictitious story about a couple of riders who were having mechanical problems, and couldn't he, with his experience, help them out?  No doubt, Keith was not excited about being tapped to work on his vacation but, being a nice guy, he skipped his shower and came down to see what was going on.  The look on his face when he emerged onto the deck and saw the tandem, in its original paint, was truly priceless.  Soon, his wife Pat joined us and we spent at least a half hour chatting about the bike and Keith's framebuilding history.

Keith quit building frames in the late 1990s to teach high school science.  He's got a few years left before retirement and says that he's leaving the door open to doing some bike work again in retirement, though not on a full commercial scale.  It was obvious that he took a great deal of pride in his work as a framebuilder and that he was an early developer and adopter of a number of innovations that found their way into accepted frame design.  Keith also corrected a number of misconceptions I had received from reading online posts from self-proclaimed "knowledgeable experts."

Keith did, indeed, build some frames and forks for Masi, but he did not master the trade in the Carlsbad shop, as some seem to think.  Once Carlsbad closed, Keith (who had started building his own bikes in San Diego around 1974, near, but not associated with Masi USA) agreed to manufacture for Masi under contract in his own shop.  Without mentioning names on the Masi side, Keith put his own business on hold to do the Masi work, but this proved difficult.  The Masi work came in fits and starts, with unexpected delays in obtaining components and orders that resulted in periods of weeks in which Keith didn't have work.  One cannot take custom orders without the ability to provide delivery dates, so he wasn't making money on the deal, overall.  Add to that delays in receiving payment, and it didn't take Keith too long to throw in the towel on the Masi deal, which still seems to be a thorn in his side.  This would have been around 1977, before Masi setup the Rancho Sante Fe and San Marco operations.

Keith said that our bike has the third generation of his decals (which was likely the last.  The serial number and information I received from the original owner places the frameset around 1987.  It has a number of unusual, custom details (more on those later).  Keith said that he was dissatisfied with the Columbus tandem tubing that was commonly used at the time.  Contrary to what has been stated by some of the aforementioned "experts", Keith did not use custom-drawn tubing from Pacific northwest aerospace suppliers.  Rather, the frame is made from straight gauge chromoly steel, with the oval top tube from Phil Wood, who was custom-drawing these for framebuilders at the time.  Phil had become a supplier for the tandem market, expanding his highly respected hub and bottom bracket offerings with an advanced (if fatally flawed from a design perspective) disk brake.  Keith also wasn't merely experimenting with oval tubes, as some claim, but rather had a design philosophy that followed from an analysis of the stresses on tandems.  He reasoned that the forces acting on the top tube were primarily horizontal, while stresses in the boom tube were torsional.  He felt that the best combination would be an elliptical top tube, and round mid and boom tubes, providing improved stiffness while softening road shock.  At least one other, now famous, tandem builder visited Keith's shop to benefit from his experience, though, having one of this builder's tandems from that era, I can tell you that he missed the recipe for Keith's secret sauce.

Here are some features of our Lippy.

That's the Lippy logo in the fork crown.  Keith said he had the fork blades custom drawn to use a heavier gauge steel and added an insert into the steerer to strengthen the fork in this critical area.  That's the original Dura Ace road headset, which is still in excellent condition.

Note the use of the oval top tube to internally route the rear brake cable.  The Scott Superbrake looks a lot cooler than it works.  Perhaps its lack of performance has more to do with the 25 year-old brake pads than the unique brake design.

Clean brazing on the front dropouts.

The brass head badge is silver brazed directly onto the frame.  It has discolored a bit under the clearcoat, but it's still classy, perhaps only challenged at the time by Bilenky's silver creations on his Sterling tandems.  The Scott Superbrake provides barely enough clearance for 28mm tires.

Here's a full-on shot.  The bike is a tad too large for Jeanne to allow fitting of a shock absorbing stoker seatpost , so we've replaced the rear saddle with a sprung Brooks leather model that has proven quite satisfactory.  The custom fade was done to the customer's specification by Keith, who did his own painting.  No stock colors or limited selections for Lippy customers.

Keith pointed out the large-diameter seat stays he used to stiffen the rear triangle, rather than to add an extra set of stays.  Keith didn't recall fitting any Campagnolo cranksets to his tandems.  These were on it when I got the bike, though I replaced the triple arm with one that was drilled for standard 74mm chainrings, to get a lower gear for our Vermont mountains.  I've always loved their clean, vintage look.

I don't think I ever noticed the rider in the negative image formed by the left side of this decal until Keith pointed it out.  Apparently, we were not the only ones who didn't see this in the graphic.

Note the custom seatpost binder and the points on the seat tubes, custom details that didn't make it onto all his frames, according to Keith.

Rear Brake Bridge Detail

Seat Tube Decal

We really appreciated the opportunity to meet the builder of our favorite tandem.  Keith had mentioned to the other riders on the tour that he had been a builder, but they were not aware that he was one of the legends of American framebuilding until we showed up with the proof of his skill and design genius.  There's a reason why, over 25 years later, people still skip over a hundred high-tech Cannondales, Co-Motions, and  Santanas, to see the Lippy at tandem rallys.  Keith said that, should he return to building in retirement, he will likely stick to singles, even though most of the frames he made were tandems.  Too bad--we told them that, if we could, we would commission him to make one like ours, but custom sized.  We love it!