Should there be grease in my steel frame's tubes? I've taken apart a road bike from the 70s with a (french) ball bearing bottom bracket. Looking inside I found (what I thought to be) absurd amounts of grease in the tubes coming into the bottom bracket. I'm a bike work beginner and intuitively I would've thought that's excess grease pushed into the tubes, but the sheer amount made me wonder whether it's there intentionally - maybe to seal off the tubes/bottom bracket?

Also haven't found anything on it yet on Sheldon Brown's website, but that might just be my fault.



Thank you for your help.
Some mechanic might have put a liberal amount of grease in the BB shell and also in the head-tube prior to assembly. Then copiously greased the seat-post as well. Grease has a tendency to migrate, especially in hot weather and move to the strangest places, the bike may have been stored upside down, head or tail-up.

Think of it as a gift from whoever put it there, the coating also prevented the tubes from rusting on the inside. Wipe off the excess before re-assembly and repack the BB and the headset with fresh grease. In no case would I use solvent to clean the insides of the frame.