Originally Posted by
Blastoff
Wow! thank's for the detailed info, 20y ago when I bought this bike, the owner of the cycle store did tell me that this bike was imported from Italy but some other guy told me "Naaaa it's Gardin who fabricated it..." so I never really went to the bottom of it until now. What I can say about it is that in my racing years, this bike was a really good road racing bike, short, almost as a track bike and very fast cornering, I did many good races with it, I know only 2 other guy's that still own a CR, one is totally original and in mint condition, do you think these bikes have a good $$$ value in the (almost) vintage market?
Well, you and they are all right. I was on Montreal's Centre du Vélo racing team a couple of years before Gardin started making them in Toronto. The bikes we received in the early years came out of Italy and were of extremely high quality. A Cambio Rino branded component gruppo was a couple of pounds lighter than a Campagnolo Super Record gruppo (italian for group or groupset). And yes, the handling was stunning! I owned a road bike, the Corsa model (optimized for criteriums), and a track bike. Unfortunately, I had a very bad crash with the road bike (sand in a hairpin turn at the bottom of a steep hill) and the frame was a complete loss.
The store owner knew Gardin and forged a business alliance with him - as they were still importing from Italy everything was all hush-hush. Once the bikes started coming out of Toronto, they were botched, inconsistent, and often done very badly - with bad brazing work (gaps, etc). No two biked of same model and frame size actually had the same angles or dimensions. If that guy was a master framebuilder as Guisseppe Gardin had claimed he was (and not just a jobless cousin brought over to help him out), then that "master framebuilder" must have had a severe drinking problem to produce such junk. He was a disgrace to the name Cambio Rino. It was a true toss roll of the dice as to whether you'd end up with a good or a bad Gardin (whether called Cambio Rino initially or Gardin after bad relations developped with Italy). If you have an Italian-made Cambio-Rino, it probably has a serial number stamped into the bottom bracket, followed by a model year a bit apart from the rest of the number. I'm not sure if the Toronto ones did or not.
If anyone has a Cambio Rino road racing bike, out of Italy, ideally in a size between 56cm-60cm, I would be very interested in seeing the bike or learning about it's geopmetry. inclinometers are cheap on ebay... quite handy (but the bike has to be perfectly vertical, with the drivetrain side leaned against the wall, and the inclinometer held perfectly in the same plane as the frameset, and top tube angle needs to be measured as well in case there is a slight difference in rims or tire size/inflation).