Originally Posted by
Dean51
Great project Andy K! FWIW, I've had an '83 Konno Allez in my fleet for a few years now. I acquired it along with an '81 that I sold as it was too small for me. While both were in my possession, I observed the '81 had the shift cables routed under the BB while the '83 had the cables running over the top...as yours are. I reached out to Tim Neenan in the spring of 2017 and asked him why the change was made. He got right back to me. Tim said he had spec'd the bikes to have the cables run below the BB and that Yoshi must have made the change on his own for reasons unknown. In a follow up email, he sent me the picture below..... Tim, Yoshi Konno, and Yoshi's daughter.
Dean
Japan 001
Wow! That picture is fantastic!
The 3Rensho-built (I hesitate to say Konno-built because I know he had apprentices) Specialized bikes are a bit of an enigma. I've been reading the scraps of information available in various discussion forums, and I saw somewhere that Specialized didn't sell these as an upscale version of the Allez or Sequoia. They were just part of a contract with 3Rensho (meaning the company). But that doesn't square with the well-established stories of Mike Sinyard, Tim Neenan, Jim Merz, and Mark DiNucci (at different times, I assume) spending months in Japan to make sure that every detail was exactly the way they wanted them. How is it possible that Yoshi Konno was given this degree of freedom in the design and yet these bikes weren't marketed as a special sku? Or were they?