WOW! Italian Beauty! Love it!
[QUOTE=khatfull;12611079]Well, my good (
) friends Scottryder and Collin2424, especially the latter, have been after me to do something other than a Fuji for some time now. I have to say the thought has been intriguing and Collin finally found something that pushed me over the edge.
Since the frameset has been delivered to my facilitator in the Denver area I'm comfortable posting it. I'm the proud new owner of a 1974 Italvega Super Speciale. Of course, this is a Ben Lawee design, produced in Italy before Lawee moved production of his frames to Japan and changed the name of his brand to Univega.
The seller of the frameset is the original owner. He bought it, rode it briefly, then moved the original Nuovo Record group to a Colnago frame that he raced in crits. The Italvega has hung ever since. Of note, he told me that he rode it in an epic one day, 14 hour Denver to Aspen ride. Wow.
The frameset is in phenomenal condition, the only flaws pretty much where stuff was clamped, shifters, cable guides, etc. I had plans to hang an early Japanese group on it but the more I think about it the more I feel that if I'm going to have a non-Fuji I might as well go in deep and hang NR back on it. So, here real soon, I'll start looking for the proper NR components...slowly as I can trade, snipe, etc. good deals. I'm not going to try to get date proper bits....if a nice 83 NR RD comes along so be it. Nor do I want to drop the coin for dead NOS stuff. Nice overall condition components will be fine. If ya got anything...aside from the already installed record headset I'm a blank slate (again?!)
Construction is evidently Columbus SP/SL double butted and the frame has the old, square Columbus decal. Fun things like hand drilled and finished dropouts, and the seatpost binder NOT being Campy as was mentioned by the reviewer of the '73 also make the frame intriguing.
Anyway, here are some pics as they came from the seller. It should get shipped sometime this coming week and I'll post some more pics.
Ok, so is the Earth turning on a different axis? It almost feels like it.
Specs of the '73 model from a Bicycling review of the bike:
