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| COLUMBUS: TRADITION AND CHARACTER OF PRODUCTS For more than 50 years, COLUMBUS has been the marque for specialised tubes for racing bicycles. The A.L. Colombo steel company began from 1919 to produce cold-drawn tubes for bicycles. Towards the nineteen-thirties the firm gave the name "Columbus" to a new series of light tubes of high strength, reinforced and with a conically varying thickness. It was thus that the heritage of technological knowhow that the firm had accumulated in other spheres, from aeronautics to automobiles, found application in the world of cycling. Of the number of 'historic' achievements of the mother company, recall the structures of the aircraft which made the first risky flights, and the "GILCO" tubular chassis made for the Ferrari racing cars of Fangio, Villoresi and Ascari between 1945 and 1950. Thanks to the experience acquired from these exceptional projects, we decided to use the celebrated chrome molybdenum alloy steel for bicycles also. To this day, this alloy characterises COLUMBUS products. From that moment we started research into which parts of the frame are subject to the greatest stresses and to find ways to make them more resistant to deformation and breakages. Two innovations we introduced are particularly noteworthy: elliptical-sectioned forks and conical thickness variation. For track speed record attempts we made an extra light series which allowed the great champions to beat the one hour record: from Coppi to Riviere, from Anquetil to Merckx in 1972. Technological progress is always the premier objective of the new Columbus S.p.A., a separate company since 1978. It is thanks to research made in collaboration with the principal Italian laboratories, and to the sophisticated tests that resulted, that new series have been born, such as SLX: making victorious champions from Gimondi to Hinault, Merckx to Saronni. Today COLUMBUS offers a very complete range of tubes for very diverse applications: professional track and road racing, BMX, amateur and touring cyclists. |
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