Actually, the story I heard from a guy at the Texas (Houston, specifically) shop was that this guy's brother-in-law, a South African who had raced in Europe, had bought the rights to the LeJeune name and set up production in South Africa. The ones I saw in the shop a couple of years ago were 853 I believe. The frame quality was OK except the paint was terrible - it was peeling in spots on new frames on the shop floor.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
-----Original Message----- From: Diane Feldman [mailto:feldmanbike@home.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 1:10 PM To: fred_rednor@yahoo.com; RALEIGH531@aol.com; classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: Re: [CR]Anybody Heard of the Stella Arctic?
Maybe the question has gone through the group before, but what legal issues
would somebody trip over if naming a new line of frames/bikes after a
defunct one? I have heard, for instance, that a Texas bike store has sold
some reportedly very good 753 frames made in South Africa and labeled
Lejeune. This obviously doesn't include frames like Jonathan Boyer's
Confentes or George Mount's Merz--or those made-in-Nevada Gitanes that some
other guy rode.
David Feldman
> > To protect the guilty? Preserve the rep of the quality
> > nameplates? They knew they were sending less than their
> > best effort and didn't want a bunch of gaspipe bikes > >
> running(or sitting) around with "good" names on them.
>
> Also, there were a number of cases where the importer used a
> name of its own choosing to create its own brand - Mel Pinto
> for example, who's own bikes looked suspiciously like mid-level
> LeJeunes. In fact, someone like LeJeune probably did not even
> make its own frames, even if the painting was done in-house.
> Many bikes may have been shipped here by pseudo-manufacturers
> who were merely assemblers of frames made by larger concerns.
> Fred
>
>
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