Phil wrote:
have a late '70s Colnago Super I am restoring. It has no special provenance. Just ridden to church every Sunday by a little old lady in Pasadena.
It is at least a '76 frame because it has the top tube braze-on cable guides. The Campy NR bits on it were date coded '78 and '79, so I guess that brackets it. I am going to have it resprayed and the decals replaced.
What I want to know is about chrome head tub lugs. I've seen several Supers with these that seem to fall on either side of this period (or perhaps within, too). Was this standard at some point in the line or was it a customer special order thing?
I like the aesthetics of chrome/contrasting lugs and would like to go that way on this restoration. That is, unless it will cause me to get my apprentice status in the Restorer's Union revoked.
-- Phil Sieg Knoxville, Tennessee
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you could find chrome head lugs on all Supers up to the end of the model in the 1980s. This feature would have made the bike a bit more costly at retail. There was no special model designation attached. Most Supers had painted lugs, a relative few had chromed lugs, although you tend to see more chromed lugs, the younger the frame gets. In the late 70s chromed lugs were probably fairly trick.
So, you could do it and the frame would be perfectly correct. Just repaint with an original Colnago color. Molteni orange, candy blue or candy red, silver, candy lime-green. Black. Then there was that really cool sort-of rose/salmon metallic. Also there was that light mauve/magenta candy or metallic color that's really nice too, and no other marque I can think of, offhand, used that one.
Colnagos came in many, many colors, but those are the ones I associate with the marque..
Charles Andrews SoCal
"What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are."
- Epictitus