Few brands can call on the heritage that Colnago has at its disposal. Even among the storied history of Italian cycling, amongst the likes of Bianchi and Pinarello, Colnago has a place in folklore a notch or two above. Partially I think it has to do with the association it had in the past to riders such as Merckx, Maertins, Saronni, and Museew, and teams like Mapei and Molteni. Whether for the fact it was good tech at the time, or had a good eye for picking winners, it was a brand that had a hell of a pedigree. It was also never a brand afraid to try new things: Integrated cables, carbon monocoque frames, 26in wheels on the road, aerodynamic tubing, all pioneered on bikes conceived and fabricated in what is now the Italian Silicon Valley for cycling; the northern oval taking in Milan, Bergamo and the surrounding area.
While steel is no longer the material of choice for WorldTour pros, Colnagos can now be seen under UAE Team Emirates, and most prominently under Slovenian phenomenon Tadej Pogačar; no doubt now a name to add alongside the greats of the past. While the V4Rs that he and the rest of the team use are finished and assembled in Italy but created overseas, Colnago has committed to keeping its C-Line - that being the C68, C68 Allroad, and C68 Titanium - an entirely Italian product. The carbon tubing is made in Italy, the tubes are assembled into frames in the Cambiago headquarters, shipped to just outside Pisa for paint, and then sent back for final assembly. Even the 3D-printed titanium lugs are made a half-hour drive away from the brand's base of operations. Its heritage steel frames too, the Master and the Arabesque, are fabricated near the headquarters. In an industry in which the majority of frames are produced in Taiwain, this firm grip on an Italian identity is perhaps key to the brand's longevity.
While in the North of Italy on some other business, I paid Colnago a visit to see how the brand stands today, and was given behind-the-scenes access to the factory floor, the paint shop, and the facility where the titanium parts are created. I also spent some time in the office backroom where countless priceless and historic bikes are just propped up, dishevelled against the walls, but that’s a treat for a separate piece. For now, let’s look at what ‘Made in Italy’ really means, and why the C68 remains such an object of desire for many.
The factory floor
Given the size of the brand in terms of cycling folklore, the headquarters in Cambaigo is relatively unassuming, if you choose to ignore the giant metal globe upon which a bronze recreation of the carbon C42 that Pavel Tonkov used in the 1996 Giro d’Italia sits pride of place like a Christmas angel. Inside the mirrored front doors the entrance lobby is scattered with a handful of bikes deemed important enough to be on display: Titanium frames in Mapei livery, satin Shamal wheels catching the afternoon sun as it pours through the room. Split downtube Masters, terrifying vintage time trial machines with 19mm tubs, and leant up in the corner fresh out of the back of a van, the mud-spattered V4Rs upon which Tadej Pogačar won the 2023 Tour of Flanders.
Beyond the gloss of the lobby, through a heavy black door, you reach what can loosely be described as the assembly line. At the base of prefab shelving units a small army of jigs flanks the entrance corridor like soldiers on parade; which jigs get to spend the day on the shop floor depends on the model and size in production. The jigs themselves have the marks of years of use. The satin sheen of oiled, machined steel. Blackening in places, the odd spot of rust, and covered in notes scribbled in sharpie on masking tape, or in Tipp-ex, or on bits of paper stuck on. Old notes don’t seem to get archived, with one jig having instructions for a C64, a C60, and the C68 Allroad.
At one of four assembly benches, the tubes and lugs are gathered from their respective shelving units and the margins protected with masking tape. A thick, two-part adhesive is mixed up with a palette knife before being applied to both mating surfaces, before slotting the tubes together, wiping off the excess (contained mainly by the masking tape) and placing them all in the jig. Occasional persuasion is needed with a rubber mallet to get the fit just so, before the whole shooting match, frame and jig together, is wheeled into the oven for initial curing.
The lugged construction is the hallmark of the C series, but the modern C68 only really makes a visual point of highlighting the lugs at the headtube and at the top of the seatpost. The remaining joins at the bottom bracket and the seat stays are treated to an ‘aesthetic wrap’ of non-structural carbon. This is applied as a series of pre-cut, sticky-backed carbon strips that are applied over the slightly recessed join area, before being tightly bound in translucent blue heat shrink and placed in the oven for a final time. The wrap constricts, smooths, and forces any excess adhesive out of the area. Despite its best efforts though it doesn't leave a surface conducive for painting and so, following this final cure, the frames are sent to a final room for deburring and racking up for transit to an industrial estate just north of Pisa, about three hours down the road.
Frames fresh from the paint shop arrive back in Cambiago for assembly and shipping; banks of frames sit in the combination space that is the warehouse and building station. Dozens of stock colour frames make for orderly rows, but behind them, there’s the chaos of the custom options. Some individual frames for customers with specific tastes, alongside clusters of three or four matching frames in the colours of high-end businesses, perhaps something for a shop floor, or a Sunday treat for board members?
Regardless of the colour and model, each frame is tagged with a QR code so as to avoid any mixups, and assembled from start to finish by a single person. Yes, I’m sure Henry Ford will be turning in his grave at the lack of an assembly line, but I’m assured that this way ensures the employees are more connected to the final product, and take more pride in their work.
The paint shop
While the Colnago factory at its headquarters didn’t feel overly modern, it didn’t feel dated by any stretch. Bicycle construction isn’t aerospace for the most part, especially if you dive into steel frame construction. That being said, visiting Pamapaint was like shooting back a couple of decades. Painting is inherently a messy process though…
I was greeted by Massimo, the owner, and the man responsible for all of the iconic, outlandish Colnago paint jobs of the last few decades. The neon fades, the wee little man on the top tube, the airbrushed Ferraris. Yes, when you think of Colnago you think of Ernesto, but in an era of round tube ubiquity it is perhaps Massimo who is responsible in a large part for the brand's identity.
The frames arrive from Cambiago and are immediately keyed for priming; finely scratched all over to allow the primer to stick. In some cases the primer also acts as the base coat of paint: The V4Rs in the UAE Team Emirates or UAE Team ADQ colourways use a black primer/basecoat combo, while the C68 Titanium uses a gold base coat which is masked off to provide accents. This is sprayed on in a large pressurised booth and then baked hard.
While I was there, a fresh batch of V4Rs frames were in for the UAE Team Emirates colourway. Out of the oven, once the juices run clear, there’s a fair load of masking to do. The UAE scheme is a simple paint scheme in the grand scheme of things, but still requires hand masking, initially with fine, flexible orange tape to get the outlines perfect, then wide masking tape to cover the rest. Once the key areas have been shielded the silver glitter effect is applied using an airbrush in one of two extremely crusty paint booths; I imagine an Italian paint booth is like an Italian Mokka pot: never cleaned for fear of losing some unquantifiable good vibes.
The volume of paint needed to produce the desired result is minuscule. Just 0.3ml of silver glitter finish is used, and it takes several minutes to apply correctly, to get the fade into black just so. Silver glitter is just a clear lacquer with the right amount of flake in it, but everything else requires a bit more work when it comes to getting the mix right. Massimo proudly tells me he never uses a colourimeter, and can mix everything perfectly by eye. While he told me this he took two black paints, poured them onto some metal, and told me one was far too brown and needed yellow adding, and the other was too blue. To my eyes they were identical, so I’m inclined to believe him. Breathing solvents for 50 years probably does wonders for one's colour perception.
Paint, too, is slightly at the whim of the conditions. One batch may be perfect for the morning, but a change in humidity or temperature as the day progresses can throw things out of balance, and so key colours are mixed up in larger batches in a central room and piped around the shop to reduce the influence of the climate. This feel for the paint is why Massimo also prefers to hire his staff when they’re young, train them up, and retain them. There are some things that take years to master.
In almost all cases painting is a process done by hand, but in the finishing room, where the frames are checked for defects and hand polished if necessary, there was a large gantry tucked away behind racks of masking paper, covered in nozzles. Powered by Windows 95, this was effectively an inkjet printer capable of producing whole bike paint. If you’ve ever seen the Gazzetta Della Sport paint job, that was done on this, but even on an automated machine Massimo still had to constantly adjust the paint flow valves while it was running using two Phillips Head screwdrivers.
Hip replacements and titanium lugs
If Pamapaint felt like the past, and the factory floor the present, then Permedica, a medical implant factory a half hour's drive from Cambiago, definitely felt like the future. It specialises in producing stainless steel and titanium bits and bobs to replace hips, knees, shoulders, and any other worn-out bits of the human body. Stick with me a second.
The production facility was space age, with four-axis lathes, CNC machines, milky lubricant spraying in sealed booths, and, in a series of side rooms, the facilities for additive titanium manufacturing; 3D printing to you and me. Alongside all the bionic bodyparts, this is where the lugs for the titanium versions of the Colnago C68 and the C68 Allroad are made, along with one-off pieces like the Giro d’Italia trophy homage water bottles for the all-gold C68.
Printing with titanium is a little different to that of plastic. Given that titanium melts at 1668 degrees Celcius, you can’t very well soften it up and squeeze it through a nozzle. Instead, an extremely fine powder consisting of titanium, aluminium, and vanadium is evenly spread across a base plate before a high-power laser traces the print shape, locally amalgamating the powder into a solid alloy where required. Once one layer is complete another layer of powder is deposited by a moving arm that’s vaguely reminiscent of arcade coin dozer machines. Sadly I wasn’t permitted to force a two-cent piece into the mechanism.
The production of these lugs is definitely a side quest for Permedica compared to the volumes of bionic hips they churn out, but the QC is still no less intricate. Each batch is inspected before being sent back up the road to Cambiago, primarily to make sure the surface finish is appropriate for being painted.
There’s every chance that these parts could be ordered in from elsewhere, anywhere in the world, for less, but that would void the fact that the C series bikes genuinely are, from the production of the constituent parts themselves through the paint, to the finished product being shipped out, made by hand in Italy. Whether that adds any real value is down to the consumer, but it certainly helps maintain the brand’s identity as a true staple of Italian cycling.
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