snipped: "Masi was once a proud name. The Haro Masis put paid to that."
i think it ended in the mid 70s when the masical musical was on it's 2nd or 3rd gen of stewardship. to be clear, anything after the recht era was just "branding" imo. by then the frames began to lose any connection to the vigorelli. e-RICHIE chester,ct
On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 10:11:33 -0800 "C. Andrews" <chasds@mindspring.com> writes: To me, the Masi GC--especially the Carlsbad frames, but all of them really--the Masi GC was an unusual hybrid. A production frame with custom qualities in the finish details. This was true of a few other italian production frames in the late 60s and early 70s, Colnago, and De Rosa in particular, Cinelli sometimes.....
(seems to have depended on who built a given frame and their mood at the time, at Cinelli..<g> and I love Pogliaghis, but there is no refinement in them...a macho trackie thing, yes, but refinement of fit and finish? Hardly)...
.......for those few years between about 1968 and 1974 those guys, and a few others, defined the highest level of quality in a production frame. All you have to do is compare an early Carlsbad GC to any other production frame of the time, and the differences in refinement of filing, fit, and finish are glaringly obvious.
That changed fairly quickly...but for a few years in there, this was true.
And these differences would be as obvious with no paint, seems to me. Compare a typical Carlsbad GC to most English and ANY french or Swiss production frame *of the same period*......
(Herse and Singer excepted...but they weren't really mass-production shops either)
......and there's no comparison when it comes to the time taken with attention to detail, and no comparison of the final results...which is one reason most 60s and 70s production frames hold no interest for me: they're crude, even trashy... there's little real aesthetic value in them, and owning the few of them that I do I regard as a form of slumming....for instance, that Rickert I got recently, hey, I liked the paint and the cool pinstripes...but otherwise? A piece of production junk... which is true of most of the bikes we like from the 70s.. I love Mondias, for instance, but by the early 70s they have all the refinement of a Ford Pinto, when it comes to fit, finish, and general aesthetic interest, *sans* the cool paint.. They do ride nice though, which is true for most of the 70s sport-touring frames with long wheelbases, low bottom brackets, and slack angles. But they'd look sadly crude under the paint.... hey, a lot of them look crude *with* the paint!
And it is these facts that prompted my initial post. As someone else said in this thread...Masi was once a proud name. The Haro Masis put paid to that. And I think that's sad, however much money might be made on them.... (and the fact that someone appears to be blowing them out doesn't exactly speak well for their marketability, does it?)
Charles "snob" Andrews
SoCal