Tom and Jack,
Pardon me for comming out of nowhere, but I can comment on Medici bicycles and shed some light on the quality of the frames as compared to other handmade frames of the period. The sequence of events you (Jack) laid out is not quite accurate, but to explain exactly how, when and why Medici came into being is a long and complex tale. For the time being I'll just tell you all about how the frames were made and by whom. Medici had a long history, about 25 years or so; therefore I shall only relate information about the "early" frames, let's say from their beginnings in 1977 or thereabouts to 1980.
To begin with, Medici had good financial backing through the ownership of the company by Bill Recht, who also at the time Medici was forming was already using Mario Confente to build the "Bicycles by Confente" that most of us are familier with. Mario was let go from Masi Carlsbad and Bill Recht hired him on and put him in business during the time he was also trying to buy the Masi Carlsbad operation. The purchase of Masi never happened, so Recht decided to start a bike company from scratch, hiring Mike Howard and Gian Simonetti to form Medici. I was "invited" to move to L.A. to be the painter, but I declined and went into building frames on my own. Mike and Gian built the first frames and they were being painted at the Confente facility a few miles away. So from the very beginning Medici had access to the nicest tools and materials because Recht was already involved with Mario. Recht was tied to the printing industry and saw to nice decals. The paint jobs seem to vary quite a bit during the first several years as painters came and went. By the time Mike and Gian moved into the previous Confente building where the spray booth was (due to a falling out between Recht the owner and Confente the employee), I appeared from out of state and was hired as a sub-contractor to paint the frames. Mike and Gian had gotten the building process down pretty good by then and I was painting. The bikes were in many ways superior to the previous generation of Masis that the same people built in Carlsbad, partially due to having access to a wider variety of cool framebuilding materials to work with. In addition to that, I was paid to make the original full scale drawings for each "standard frame" in each size. The bikes steered more like a nice Colnago than the Masis that had way too much rake and steered poorly for my taste. The Medici was a much more raceable bike for Southern CA than a Masi. I personally would take a Medici my size of the period over a Masi of the period in a heartbeat; and that is not to say Masis were bad, they were fine as far as workmanship and finish goes; but the steering in my size especially, was never accptable to me. That would have been around early 1978. Later on They hired another painter, Chuck Carr, to paint as I helped with framebuilding duties as a lug cutter, and lug and frame finisher. Some other previous Masi employees worked at medici under the same situation. Sheridan "Red" Saxon was there and also the frambuilder responsible for the few "Wolf" frames from Huntington Beach, John Sencak worked along side me for a time. We all took pride in our work, as did Mike and Gian. The bikes were well designed and well built. They used the same tubing to oval the chainstays and used the IC lugs that Mario designed for Recht, that even Mario didn't get to use. There was a lot od hand work involved for a "production" bike, including the three lug cutouts on each frame; all cut by hand in hard IC lugs. I did my share and it was a pain in the ass. The paint finish seemed to be all over the map over the years, which may make some think the frames weren't anything special. Wrong! The framebuilding work of mike Howard was always top notch, and Mike did most of the actual work in the early days and had good support before 1980. The bikes continued to be well made for all intents and purposes until the end. The Company had to change with the times, but all of the lugged steel frames have character and class, and there are a significant number of them that are exceptional. Particularly the early frames.
Hope this helps answer a few of the Medici questions. The whole story and all of the tributaries, as you probably know, is quite long and twisted. The whole story is book material actually. Someday the whole saga will be printed in detail and all in one place. But not today. If you have a nice one cherish it, it is a piece of American framebuilding History.
Brian Baylis
Vintage Cycle Studios
El Cajon, CA