Jan Heine wrote:
>
(snip)
> FB claims (also in early ads from the late 1930s, but not repeated in
> later ads) that they made hubs in France. This would involve at least
> a machine shop. They had a lot of very specific hubs for the French
> market, such as tandem hubs with different flange spacing, which
> would have been useless in Italy. So in the very least, the French
> market was very important to them - unlike most Italian makers who
> more or less ignored the French market until at least the 1950s.
>
> (Maybe the claim for production was just to avoid tariffs, and they
> smuggled the goods across the mountains, thus the location in a
> far-off mountain village? I am speculating here...)
(snip)
Great info on Cognin, France Jan!
As to the claim of making the parts in France I always figured they just trasported the individual parts across the border (short trip from the factory) and then assembled the parts into components in France (example: hub flanges and hub barrels pressed together in Cognin) to meet some legal definition of "Made in France."
Chuck Schmidt South Pasadena, CA
.