By the 80s (I think) De Rosas were probably brazed on a carousel, an infernal, horrible torture device with humans strapped to it. Most all larger lugged steel frame producers went to those, I'm not singling out DeRosa. Joints to be brazed are heated by fixed torches and come to the human already hot, probably too hot, and the human has to finish the joint in the time allotted, because the carousel will move on whether it is done or not.
I saw only two DeRosas from this period with the paint off. Both had almost fully one half of the seat lug utterly unbrazed, as far as I could tell from the outside (i.e. without cutting the frame in half). Maybe just a coincidence; a sample size of two is too small to say much with confidence, but it's hard for me to imagine this happening even once on a frame brazed by a human who wasn't tied to a carousel.
Carousels are incredibly noisy, with all those giant rosebud torches roaring, and of course awfully smoky and hot, and so the kind of workers you'll get who are willing to work under those conditions are not your sensitive creative types. More likely typical factory workers who work there because they couldn't find or keep a better job. I know that's a terrible thing to say especially because of the exceptions, the wonderful people with passion for bicycles who no doubt had their reasons for working there. But there has to be a tendency for the more artistic types to stay away from such an atmosphere.
Bill Davidson was flirting with the idea of buying a carousel during the time I worked there, probably a Taiwanese copy of the Italian ones, or maybe making his own. We went so far as to build a BB shell pre-warming station with 6 or 8 propane/oxygen torches aimed at the shell. The torches were on a little trolley that was rolled back and forth continuously by an electric motor, to give a "waving" effect similar to what a human would do. (Spreads the heat avoiding localized hot spots, and helps prevent the flame blowing big chunks of the paste flux off) It worked great, incredibly fast, but we all hated it so much and more or less threatened to walk off the job if we had to use it. Multiply that by four for a full frame carousel.
I have a video of the Colnago carousel, with some Italian dude (Ernesto, I guess - someone here will know) expounding on why it is so wonderful. I don't speak Italian, and I'm hoping that what he really said isn't quite as ridiculous as the English voice-over translation, because much of what they have him saying is the most fantastic claptrap. Like how their frames never break because they age the tubing until all the molecules settle down before using it in a frame. And how straight forks absorb all the road vibration, while curved forks can't because the curve is rigid.
The video can be downloaded from
http://bulgier.net/
It is 17MB, kinda big if you have a modem; maybe only for you lucky broadband users. Right-click and chose "Save Target As..." (MSIE users - probably similar in other browsers) so that it doesn't try to open it in your browser. My bandwidth won't allow this one to "stream" to you even if yours does.
Mark Bulgier
Seattle, Wa
USA