I thought that someone should jet in to respond to Billy Spaceman Baccarat's plea for information on Mecacycle Turbo frame sets.
Mecacycle started up in early 1980s...82 I think, and were based at No 19 Rue de Gutenberg, St Etienne, just down the road from Cycles Mercier based at No 49. The managers were Messrs Crozet and Chouchou.
The company first showed its products at the 1983 Paris Cycle Show..and earned many Brownie points and publicity by letting the Cizeron company badge one of the Turbo frames up in Bernard Thevenet's livery (produced for a short time by Cizeron), whilst letting Cycles Delcroix, also exhibiting at the Show, think that they had exclusive rights to the unusual twin-seat-tube frame.
The Turbo, a variation on the twin-seat tube configuration developed by several other makers, uses two shortened and slightly modified fork blades to form the twin tubes. The thin end of the blade is fixed to the bracket shell and the wider part of the blade is bronze-welded to a foreshortened seat tube about two-thirds of the way up. The front forks also use the modified blades, the tops of the blades being curved inwards and bronze-welded directly onto the fork column, thereby creating an early and very light form of uni-crown. The workmanship is excellent and the resulting joints very sleek in appearance. The crown-less fork had already been used by Didier Louis, a framebuilder from Brittany.
The Turbo existed in four forms, track, triathlon/time-trial sloping frame, road, and cyclo-cross. Almost always the frames were made from Super Vitus, but some Columbus SL tubed frames were also built. All the frames are lugless but only the early ones had bronze-welded joints for the narrow seat-tubes onto the bracket. Later frames had a specially manufactured cast bracket shell, featuring two "pipes" for the seat tubes and ovalised ports for the very slim chainstays. the shell was engraved/stamped with "Mecacycle" and "Turbo" diagonally across the shell on the upper surface.. Rear brake cables always ran through the top tubes, except on the cyclo-cross frame.
Two other features are worthy of mention. The twin blades for the seat tubes were pressed into quite a narrow section with a concave curve running longitudinally up the length..very neat and the front fork blades were also pressed into a narrower profile. The second feature was the seat cluster which had neither clamping bolt nor upstand for a collar, thereby necessitating a seat pillar with an internal expander..of the type discussed on the List about a fortnight ago. As far as I know, all frames used metric tubes, resulting in a 26.6mm seat pillar being needed.
The rear end was 37(.5) cms in length, but all the road frames came with braze-ons for a front mech, be it Huret or Simplex..in which case the single bottle-boss fixing was used.
The proximity of the Mecacycle workshop to the Mercier one was not entirely coincidental. If you ever manage to get both a Mecacycle frame and a Mercier SSC-workshop one together you will note the manner in which the ends of the rear stays and front fork blades are filed into quite long pointed "domes"..you just can't mistake them. It was rumoured that Mercier were on difficult times in the early 80s, having had a disastrous liaison with the COOP foodstore chain, a liaison that bankrupted the grocery group..and almost did the same for mercier. At that point some key workers defected from Mercier to form Mecacycle..
History was to repeat itself not much later on when Mecacycle also overstretched itself. became insolvent...and then was baled out to carry on for a few more years. The last time that I met up with them was in 1989 at the Paris Show..and I think they folded again in the early to mid-90s. The framebuilders put into redundancy formed a new company, headed up by a young lady Director, under the name of Tonic-Cycles and still trades from La Ricamarie, just outside St Etienne..and they still file the stay and fork-ends into the long points..but do not build the Turbo frame any more.
Mecacycle also built a wide range of frames including some excellent randonneurs, together with a range of racks. Other than the Turbo, the other really notable frame in the range was a time/trial frame of low profile design, using two banana-shaped tubes for seat and top tubes. These were from Excell, the "perle" model, with long straight chains of interlocking circles stamped into the tubes along their length, with each tube having four long "strings of pearls". The effect was stunning under a flamboyant finish.
Norris Lockley...Settle, UK