Don, I am sure you have a Skoda made bicycle there, as Favorit was
definitely a Skoda marque and the head badge must be the Canadian
distributors. I am sure you know that Skoda (there should be a curved
line above the S to show it is pronounced Shkoda) was a major
manufacturing and engineering company going back at least 100 years.
Towards the end of the communist era their cars got a reputation for
being old fashioned and unreliable - the latter unjustly. If you look at
Czech cars from the 1930s their designs were way in front of everyone
else, which is not too surprising, as Bohemia was the industrial heart
of the old Hapsburg empirea nd has always produced good engineers. Your
bike components could well have been based on French designs as many
companies sold outdated designs to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the
1960s and '70s. I have worked in the Czech Republic in recent years and
have a healthy respect for their tecnical abilities. The Czech Fort
range of frames sells well in the UK and I know of one respected builder
of Ordinaries based in the CR. So show off your Czech machine and
celebrate your roots!
Nigel Land
Lincolnshire UK