At 2:08 PM -0400 8/30/02, GPVB1@cs.com wrote:
>Anyone remember Excel derailleurs? My wife assembled them in the olds days in
>a factory in Illinois for minimum wage. Really gave those Shimano Larks a run
>for their money for a year or two...(not).
I thought Excel (Is it one "L" or two?) was made by Ofmega, Galli, or
one of those companies? I agree with the view that an Americans see
bikes as toys, but good bike parts are in our history. People are
also more than willing to pay top dollar for good bike parts as
evidenced by the popularity of Campagnolo. Until the 1930s there were
very good parts made in the US. So it's not like we always imported
parts. When the popularity of cycling died in the mid-30's so did
most of the companies. I've seen plenty of machinist built
Campagnolo copy deraileurs, and was it George Flagg (SP?) who made
his own deraileurs. So there were people who could do it. There was
also the Mathauser brake which was a great brake though weird
looking. We had everything to make it happen, but it didn't until
the mid-90's with Paul's parts. I remember the Italianophile 80's
and see the only reason we never made a US group was because Euro
cool was better than US cool.
enjoy,
Brandon"monkeyman"Ives
SB, CA
--
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"Nobody can do everything, but if everybody
did something everything would get done."
--Gil Scott-Heron--
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Elfie and Monkeyboy's Wurld uv Wunder
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/
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