just signed up to be notified for leopard print restock!
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I’ll have to take my coffee grinder out of the box and help you break that thing in.
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Gaaah It kinda kills me that the legacy Euro companies are doing this kind of thing now. Colnago’s NFT was goofy, the Pinarello forays into gravel make that full sus lefty Cannondale ebike look cool.
I can’t be the only person who has a huge soft spot for the cool, bare-bones alu frames Colnago, Merckx, Basso, et al were cranking out around the turn of the milennium. I guess there’s no way to crank up the Billato shops again and do relatively cheap fatte a mano en italia production, but here’s to wishing they’d at least try it instead of doing stuff like this:
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I think most of the alu frames they were cranking out were pretty crappy except the Dream. The real hot shit was what Orbea was doing. First to the sloping top tube game and using Columbus XLR8R and Lobular. One of the first to do some really nice full carbon forks too (ZACCS or ZICCS something or other). CSK also made way cooler regular ass high end alu frames than any of the Italians.
The OG Pina Prince and Dogma were cool though. If I could grab any aluminum from from early 00’s I would just ask for my CSK Deda Force 7003 back though.
This does remind me… I need to circle back to talking with FTW about some bikes.
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Really? I thought that there was a long generation of basically sturdy, fairly simple bikes, and that things only got silly when companies tried ultralight alu, sold on the premise that if you’re racing, a frame is a wear part.
I’m digging back pretty far into the mists of time here, but I’m picturing all the bikes that less illustrious teams were riding, frames that had to last a while because there isn’t a budget for a lot of spares.
In that era, I had a Cramerotti made with I think Force (there was some nonsense with the badging, if I recall correctly). It was pretty great, and the FTW I have now is basically the result of my wondering “what if that …but with tires wider than my pinky finger”.
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I miss my CSK
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I remember seeing some wild ass team issue stuff and there were some cool Italian amy frames (Carerra, Fondriest, and the high end Bianchi stuff comes to mind) but all the stuff from Colnago seemed like a mediocre afterthought because they had basically jumped from steel straight to carbon for their teams.
Orbea was all in on aluminum right up until then came out with the first Orca and offered most of their bikes in something crazy like 16 sizes when you counted options for sloping and horizontal top tubes.
The early BMC stuff was cool too but the best of the best was all Columbus Starship, XLR8R (and later Lobular). The Deda Force 7003 stuff was really good too.
A lot of the mid-tier (Moser, Ciocc, etc) builders were just gluing carbon stays into cheaper 7005 stuff and calling it a day.
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goddamn i was just looking at Rock Lobster, Sadoff is still gluing carbon stays into alu frames, which i’m now thinking is totally rad.
scandium kinda didn’t take off huh.
All the carbon rear bikes were generally relegated to club riders as the road racers said they just felt weird and not any lighter. At least in the shop I was at from 01-06.
The carbon seatstay Deda 7005 Moser I had was definitely not as peppy as the Airplane Orbea or Force 7003 CSK
A guy who worked in that world said the carbon rear stuff was great to sell since it took less time to build, materials cost was the same, and you could charge about $500-750 more at retail.
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Deda has a really nice selection of aluminum tubes for modern bikes these days. The gravel frame I’m about to build myself will have a Deda rear end/Nova front end. I’ll be out of Nova tubes after that and probably use all Deda for future aluminum builds. They have scandium on offer too.
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but but but carbon! Material of the future! Today! I think the basic idea was “what if both wheels are insulated?” which i don’t think is that wrong, but also not as useful as just using 28mm tires if it’s such a problem. Of course, racers back then very definitely equated “my fillings are getting rattled out” with “this bike must be really fast!”
I don’t think I’m going to buy a carbon rear triangle bike, I’m mostly drawn to them because they remind me of the last time production road bikes seemed cool to me.
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I’m reading this thread and thinking of offloading the rawland for something completely unsuited for a 44 year old tubby dad, but then I never ride any of my bikes so I’ll just imagine something like that. I remember riding alu bianchis and loving how zippy they were, and then I bought a steel one.
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TC I kinda want a Tarmac SL7 because it looks fast and has BSA BB 🤷
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i’m sure modern road bikes are great, and when they make one that i wouldn’t fit on like a circus bear riding a tricycle, i’ll try one
As a LBS sales floor guy during that time period, carbon stays seemed like absolutely a way to allow a brand to have some nice price tiers and talking points along the way.
Interesting to hear about the manufacturing and pricing behind it.
You got yer basement all aluminum, your nicer aluminum+nicer parts, then your carbon stayed aluminum, then maybe carbon stays, but with nicer full carbon fork and components, then a couple of tiers of full carbon.
I always liked the LeMond half carbon/half metal bikes from that era: carbon seatstays/seat tube/top tube + metal head tube/downtube/BB/chainstays/dropouts.
They had versions in aluminum, steel, and titanium. I don’t know if they were actually any good, but they seemed cool and we sold the hell out of them.
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In my opinion carbon stays on metal frames are pretty useless. Most useless on steel, possibly least useless on aluminum but on aluminum there’s the whole galvanic corrosion thing to worry about too.
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yeah, neither the first nor the last marketing gimmick to wind up on a bike. I like that era of bike because they were really throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and seeing what would stick.
Weren’t some of the Boston Ti / steel shops doing random carbon tubes stuck in their frames in the last ten years?
Yeah Indy fab, serotta, firefly etc.
I’ve never ridden one but once all the tubes are carbon and the Ti is just lugs wouldn’t i’d think it would just be better to do tube to tube carbon… Seems like a lot of work.
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The truly discerning customer knows that the finest bicycles have to have two of the most exclusive materials, like a steak stuffed with lobster
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Most of those bikes are basically jewelry so it makes sense that buyers would want the two most expensive frame materials in one bike.
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