ITM started out as a low end manufacturer of bars and stems for the Domestic Italian bike market. Steel road bars with an alloy sleeve at the bar/stem clamping area is a little trick to make the bar look 'high end'. since most of those bars were speced on a low end road bike you can only look at the unwrapped portion, and then you would assume the entire bar was alloy i/o just being a sleeve. Japan and Taiwan bars are made like this all the time.
Tom
> Can anyone shed some light on when Italmanubri (ITM) showed
> up on the scene (or morphed from another Italian
> manufacturing entity)?
>
> What brings this question to mind is a set of ITM bars and
> stem that I recently acquired. They felt a bit heavy and
> when I removed the bar tape, the bar is steel with an
> aluminum sleeve. This is an arrangement that I haven't seen
> before and makes me curious about the age of them or whether
> this set was a lower line product. Stem fixing bolt is
> recessed Allen key so it probably isn't very old.
>
> Thanks,
> Charlie
>
> Charlie Young
> Honeybrook, PA