[CR]Cinelli fender story, etc.

(Example: Component Manufacturers:Chater-Lea)

From: <emeneff@earthlink.net>
To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:02:55 -0700
reply-type=original
cc: dmart84815@yahoo.com
Subject: [CR]Cinelli fender story, etc.

Dear Listees,

I worked and hung out at Kopp's Cycle, in New Jersey, during the early eighties and got to work on and see many lovely Cinellis. What I loved about them was the utter inconsistencies on the finishing and the metalwork. A few frames were pretty well-filed and clean. Others were, well, much less well-finished and full of file marks (especially the Mod. B's). But they seemed to have a sort of "charm" and "cachet" that many more-meticulously finished bikes lacked. And they were always priced quite a bit higher than just about any other bike, Italian or not.

Anyway, years ago I recall once talking to long-suffering, er, I mean long-time Kopp's mechanic Norman Mastrup (RIP) about his recollections of how the Cinellis came over from Italy in the 60's. He laughed and said they came in wooden crates, and can you believe THEY ALL CAME WITH FENDERS !!!! "Fenders on a racing bike !" he chortled on and recounted about how the first thing they would do would be to pull the fenders off.

Now I don't know about Cupertino Bike Shop, but when I worked at Kopp's we routinely saved just about ANYTHING that could be used or sold for something else. I am sure that many of those fender sets ended up on Schwinn LeTours and Continentals, along with UO-8's and the like.

Mike "cinelliphile" Fabian San Francisco, CA

P.S. Norman would always love to tell me how lousy that Cinelli sloping-crown fork was. If you were to have a bad crash on your Paramount or your PX10, the fork would bend and you could still save your frame. But that Cinelli fork - it was TOO strong and the frames would buckle, but the fork would be fine. "What kind of sense does that make . . . ?" he'd say derisively. He certainly didn't share my feelings about "cachet" and "charm", to put it mildly !