[CR]Lemond's frames..and Scapin..

(Example: Production Builders:Cinelli)

From: "Norris Lockley" <norris.lockley@talktalk.net>
To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:37:33 -0000
Subject: [CR]Lemond's frames..and Scapin..

If you had spent enough time going around the three main European bike shows, Paris, Cologne, and Milan, from the mid-80s until the time Lemond retired, was that somewhere in the early 90s..you would have grown to realise that just about every framebuilder was claiming to build Greg's steel frames, although the mention of Scapin was a new one to me.

I recall that an odd-ball who lived in Norwich, in the UK, claimed to have built Greg's 1989 low-pro aero Bottechia... at least that was what the "builder" said he was doing when I supplied the tube set! Several years later I began to think that if he hadn't actually built it, then he might just have designed it...but that's another story.

I know that Alain Michel, one of France's top-builders, based at Aulnay-sous-Bois, just to the east of Paris, built some of Lemond's Excell-tubed frames...as I saw them..and a few years later a small firm in La Ricamarie, just outside of St Etienne...all of whom were former top buillders for Mercier..built some frames for Lemond...also in Excell.

The La Ricamarie company, managed by a young woman frame-builder, was/is called Tonic Cycles..and it was M.Rezze, the owner of the Excell company..and father of Dante Rezze, the former RMO pro rider, who suggested I should visit the company's small workshop, to whom he supplied the tube-sets. Rezze was a master at marketing products..from tube sets to tubulars..but he never made any of the products..there was no steel-rolling or drawing machinery..not even a warehouse. Whether or not he even had a hand in designing the tubes I never did find out...but the actual frame-builder who first used the same steel tubes before Rezze cottoned on to them was Ducheron, as I remember. Funny old world, this cycling business.

Norris Lockley, Settle UK