Steven mentioned that this German company once had a factory in Italy that was sold on. It was probably the Mazzucato family that bought it. Their company apparently made a lot of pretty standard but lightweight lowish carbon tubes for bulk manufacturers such as Dawes in the UK. Somewnere in the mid-80s they started the ORIA brand as an up-market line to rival Columbus. As for Dedcacciai, an acquaintance of mine in the UK, Terry Dolan, who is the distributor for this brand, told me that the founders were a breakaway group from Columbus. Does anyone know if ORIA is still available? They did produce some 7003/7005 aluminium tubesets some years ago.
Richard's reference to Excell is an interesting one in that the origins of these very high spec tubes are quite a mystery. I tried to become the UK importer in the 80s and had contact with Monsieur Rezze (father of Dante Rezze, the former RMO-Liberia pro).In the early days Rezze was a joy to deal with, but it was a case of all talk and no delivery. Having placed a good order and failed to receive any of it, I went to visit M.Rezze's "factory/warehouse". in France. The address turned out to be a massive house in a leafy superb of Lyon, called Pierrebenite. Not seeing anything resembling even a small warehouse I enquired at the local "tabac" where M> Rezze was better known as "le mechano" a Franco-Italian name I assumed for a car machanic.The house turned out to be the home of at least four branches of the Rezze family... and the office - shown to me by Dante - was no more or less than a garden shed, identified as a bike tubing depot by one of those short pieces of plastic that are supplied to secure the end of your handlebar tape" Bike Ribbon" was written on it... it was sticking to a small window. There was no sign of any tubes. M Rezze Senior was nowhere to be seen. Dante told me that he had gone to see M. Masi in Italy. I eventually received a phone call from Rezze who boasted that he was with ".... the maestro Masi... I work with him.. the great Masi..me I work with him" - all this being regurgitated at great speed in French laced heavily with Italian. I suggested bravely that I had given him the opportunity to work with "... the great Bespoke Bicycle Company of the UK..", but he just continued to rant on about working with the great Italian maestro. Several phone calls later over the course of ten days and I had eventually managed to fix a date for dinner with M EXCELL TUBES. Needless to say he never showed up. So with no tubes to show for my money I returned to England, where I had the brainwave of contacting the Lyon equivalent of the Chamber of Trade and Industry. No messing about there at all. This proud organisation of industrial chiefs simply sent a "posse" ( can't think of the French word for a group of rather irate men) down to sort out M> Rezze. Apparently they told him in no uncertain words that it was bringing disgrace and shame on the good name of French Industry in the Lyon area. It worked "like a dose of salts" as we say over here. The tubes arrived..no apology except to say that he had sent the original batch to SEATTLE instead of SETTLE.. so if the owner of the Bespoke Bicycle Company in Seattle is still wondering where thos esuperb tubes came from , you now know the story.. or atleast the parts I dare divulge.
Rezze was not a popular man among French framebuilders generally, although I met three who used his tubes almost exclusively. In the trade his nickname was "l'Introuvable" - roughly translated as " the man you can never find" My last dealings with him were in October 1997 when I was in Lyon, trying to buy the tooling for RBE carbon framesets - a small outfit that arose out of the bankruptcy of the superb TVT company.. before I was to go onto a Supertramp concert in Grenoble. I was stopping in a hotel about 4 kms from Rezze's home. Fortunately he didn't recall me. When I asked if I could pop round to inspect his tubes he was very evasive and suggested that it would be better for me to visit Tonic Cycles in St Etienne, some 50 kms down the road because they used large quantities of his material for their high-end frames. At journey's end, an astonished managing directress - a very accomplished frame-builder and ex-Mercier Service de Course frame workshop builder--told me that they seldom used Excell and then only for the odd ATB.
It;s curious because the tubes I eventually obtained, including a set with a wallthickness in thecentre of 0.25mm, and lined internally along most of its length with carbon-fibre -were superb. I have seen various comparisons of sets of tubes and Excell always comes out way ahead of the competition. Now that Richard has suggested that the steel was probably Mannesmann's I recall that some of it was "tough" on the file and saw like some of the Oria sets i've used. However some earlier research that I had done suggested that certain series at least might have been produced by a Paris-based company called Gauthier Troussel. Last year I was once again back in Lyon, but I couldn;t find any trace of M Rezze and various framebuilders and cycle merchants in the suburbs said they had assumed he had stopped trading. Great pity he was so difficult to deal with .His "banana-shaped" curved tube sets for T-T frames, called "perle" due to the rows of pearl-like shapes pressed into the tubes along their length, produced delightfully elegant frames.
Somehow the frame trade isn't the same without characters like M L'Introuvable" Rezze.. and his superb tubes of course.
Norris Lockley... choking up now with nostalgia.. Settle (NOT SEATTLE), UK