For those who may know. I've seen several versions of the late 60's early 70's Professional.
Late 60's:

Early 70's?

I've seen more than one of them that look like they never came with Bottecchia decals on the frame..

Does anyone know if in fact that some Professionals came new with no big decals?

Also a different version of the Professional decal on the top tube.

Next question: Re frame tubing. What tubing was used?

I've seen a Giro D'Italia with this sticker and the above 1969 Professional with the same sticker.

Just above Campione Del Mondo.

rinforzati garantiti reinforced guaranteed

The Bottecchia brochure says Columbus Tubing.

And: relative tubing strength.

I currently ride a lower end Bottecchia Special. This of course would be made with heavier tubing and has stood the test of time.

Would the Professional with Columbus tubing be weaker or more prone to failure? (my weight is up there, around 300 sadly)

I read on Sheldon's pages I think that some of the newer aluminum frames, with the double butted construction, can be as thin as tin cans in the middle, to shave off every ounce of excess weight.

With a high quality steel frame, even double butted...is this an issue?

No idea how this one came, it was repainted after add on's at some point. This bike was owned by a rider in Merz's sphere and had studs added for bottle holders ala Merz but he did not do them.

Normally, no, maybe at 300lb but plenty of big guys were animals when these were being sold and I would bet there were very few failures.

Now at this juncture, this far down the line, one with a million miles, maybe a brazing void here or there and a bit too much rust somewhere "might" have a failure of some sort.

They are still few and far between but of course you don't want to be the "one".

I would encourage you to do the deep dive down the rabbit hole and educate yourself as much as you can so you can decide for yourself, we're glad to help and there are many very well versed folks here including some very well known framebuilders and many others with vast experience.

Hopefully others will be along shortly.

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...your best guide to what these looked like originally is usually the old catalog links in the sticky thread for catalogues:


Bottecchia (1972, 1978, 1985, 1989, 1990, 199x) - Bottecchia (1971) / (1973)

I think maybe your example in the OP has been enthusiastically rebadged, possibly after repainting. But it's only a guess.

I have a 1972 Professional that a friend bought new in 1972. I bought it from him a month later. The original decals were water slides and not clear coated. They were very fragile, and he scraped them off with his thumbnail before I bought it. The original blue paint was also somewhat fragile.

10 years later, I stripped and repainted it with automotive candy blue lacquer (canned paints, not rattle can) over silver base, resulting in the same color as the original blue. That paint has held up well for the past 3 decades. While I had the paint removed, I could see the Columbus logos and the markings .6-.9, indicating the tube thickness in mm. That would be Columbus SL. Larger frames I am told would be SP. The entire frame is chrome plated, although the chrome under the paint was not polished. I redid the decals using vinyls from Cyclomondo and they have held up very well.

I've ridden mine about 30,000 road miles without any type of failure. Consider that 0.6 mm is .024" or about the thickness of two business cards. But still not prone to failure unless involved in a crash.

Mine has no serial number markings at all.

As long as the frame has not been damaged from a crash or from rust or from other abuse, I very seriously doubt your weight will too be much for a Columbus tubed frame. I'm a pretty big boy myself - 6'3", 255ibs - and I have never had an issue with a higher-end steel frame (Reynolds 531, Columbus SP, Columbus SLX). Some feel a bit flexy in the bottom bracket, but all have held up just fine under my ample load. Getting a good, strong rear wheel (minimum 32 spokes, 36 is better) is good idea, as is cultivating a smooth riding style and a good idea for avoiding potholes and other road nastiness. But the frame should hold up.

Remember that butted tubes are thinned in the middle, where stresses are low, and are thicker at the ends, where stresses are higher. The joints on a high-end frame with butted tubes will be at least as strong as the mid-range frame with straight gauge tubing because the thicknesses at the ends of the tubes will be about the same. A high end frame hand built by a good frame builder may actually be stronger at the joints because of better mitering and brazing.

As for your reference to Sheldon Brown discussing aluminum frames, aluminum and steel are quite different beasts. Columbus tubing is steel, as is Reynolds, Dedaccai (sp?), Ishiwata, Tange, Oria, etc. All are drawn to what at first sounds like absurd thinness, around 0.6 or 0.7 mm in the middle and 0.9 or 1.0 mm at the ends. Tubes of those thicknesses are plenty strong; you would not want to be smacked upside the head with one.

Agreed those numbers say Columbus SL. SP dimensions are 0.1 mm thicker in the main tubes, a bit more in the stays. SL and SP are exactly the same steel.

I have a 27" Weinmann back wheel (on my Special), just bought new Continentals after wearing the other set out over years. I'm also sane about going over curbs and bumps etc.

I've been doing this since I was a kid.

People: I deeply appreciate your posts!! Funny to say, I've never known another Bottecchia person except a bud in high school who also had a Special.
I've never even seen a high end one...they were never common here.

Us Canucks didn't have the same lifestyle level as say those in Cali...until maybe much more recently.

As for riding around...I never see any bike except near new department store ones, some high end modern roadies, but not one person ever looks at my bike.

I'm the only person who has Campy on my bike...it's unknown.

To be able to access others interested is like a dream for me.

Your expertise and experience are deeply appreciated.

Around here my C&V bikes get some favorable comments, then there are the people who haven't ridden a bike in 40 years taking one look and saying "that's steel .... no good ... too heavy .... you should have bought a carbon bike like my uncle has ... it only weighs a few ounces."

Thats my bike. It did come with the DT and ST decals. The PO removed them. This is a Giro with 1972 Motobecane Le Champion Campagnolo parts + others. Note that HS is original, stem and bars, not.
[MENTION=493684]SurferRosa[/MENTION] Thanks for the compliment. I do have replacement decals and have not take the time to put them on. The big ones scare me but when I look at the checkered ones, they are not well aligned so... I will asses your comment about only doing the ST . It looks kinda bare.
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The bike I bought...that is enroute...was apparently seldom ridden by the gent's dad. Maybe 500 miles on it.

Wondering if it ever had decals?

I believe I know where your serial number is Mike. I just found it on my Special.

On the seat downtube just under the seat post near the top. Right near the Carnielli decal.

Does anyone know where I can find a correct frame pump?

A "correct" pump is relative.

The clip that is on there is for older "flattop" style that the top of the handle goes in the clip, a frame fit pump like the big one above is a better aesthetic IMO.

The flattop style has to be the right size range to stay onboard on rough roads, it needs to be mostly compressed to keep good tension, the clip can be moved to compensate but they scratch the frame so... I like the other style for that reason.

Plenty to be had on efbay.

I have an early 70's 58cm Bottecchia Professional that I stripped down and painted during the addition of braze-on cantilever post.
Bottechia Professional conversion surgery

The 58cm uses a 27.2 seatpost and feels fairly lightweight and lively, I would expect that it was built with .6/.9 SL dimension tubing rather than .7/1.0 SP dimensioned which would use a 27.0 seatpost unless it had been reamed out to 27.2

Columbus did not have names and stickers identifying their tubesets as SL or SP in the early 70's, those tubeset name did not get introduced until late 70's but the top tier seamless columbus tubesets from early 70's were essentially same as later SL and SP (just without the sticker).

My boom bike era professional will fit up to 32mm tires. Not much mud clearance left on the fork if trying to use it for cyclocross but it does make a great vintage gravel road bike when used with wide cushy tires (relaxed geometery, longish chainstay, low bottom bracket) .

Only serious problem I've had with my professional, the fork steer tube catastrophically separated from the crown because the original boom-bike era brazing was poorly done and there were large voids left in the brazing between the steer tube and the crown.

That's a pretty serious problem IMO, hope the only damage was to the bike.

Assume you fired up the torch again for the repair?

While these are great frames and bikes, it would have been well down the list for me, for that.

Finish quality on these indicates a scenario like yours possible in my mind.

That being said, my big one shown above rides fantastic even with my jacked up riding position.

Prior to the 1978 model year , there were only two commercially available Columbus road tubesets, SL and SP. On mass production frames, such as the Bottecchia Professional, SL was typically used on small and mid-size frames, with heavier gauge SP being used on the larger frames, due to the greater weight and strength of taller riders. For most mass volume manufacturers the crossover took place around the 58-60cm frame size. As previously noted, the easiest way to distnguish between the two is via the seat post diameter, with SL typically utilizing a 27.2mm post, while SP generally uses 27.0mm

...I use a lot of Zefal HPx pumps in the right size for my bikes, so in my case an HPx4. (24" frames, more or less)
They are mostly found used in the black color, and are relatively low key. The pump tubing is aluminum, not plastic, and they work well to pump a tyre under roadside repair conditions, to at least 110psi.

There are a lot of plastic, color matched Silca Imperio fans in the C+V world, but I am not one of them.

Regarding frames without decals, the LBS would sometimes receive frames with reduced or no decals, as warranty replacements. Generally, they'd have the head badge and brand name decals but no model names, so they could be used as replacements for multiple models, with reduced risk of customer fuss. Less common were cases with no decals or head badges. Sometimes, decals were shipped loose, in the carton, which the LBS had to apply. These were generally cases where the supplier was distributing identical or very similar bicycles from the same manufacturer, often under a big brand name and also his house brand.

In the case of Bottecchia, the 1970s and 1980s importer was Stuyvesant, They had a house brand, Corso, that was often manufactured by Carnielli, who owned the Bottechia brand. Alternately, you could see some Corso manufactured by Rizzato, who owned the Atala brand, also imported by Stuyvesant. Consequently, it wouldn't surpise me if there were some warranty frames rec'd by Stuyvesant without applied decals.

However, I suspect the majority of cases of C&V bicycles with no decals are simply cases where the decals were damaged to the point of being unsightly to a previous owner. Clear coating over decals to protect them didn't become popular until around the mid-1980s and some of the earlier decals were notoriously fragile. Pinarello is a case in point. They were so fragile that whenever one is seen with intact decals, members automatically suspect replacement decals. I know Pinarello still weren't using a clear coat over decals as late as 2003, as I had a NOS Prince model that was shedding it's decals, just from hanging in the shop. The local joke was not to look at it the wrong way, lest it shed some more decals.

Fork separating did cause a rather sudden crash but fortunately I was not hurt. I did manage to pinch/hammer/file the crown back into shape and re-brazed the steer tube in. I wanted the save the original character of the fork on the bike and it has held up fine now that it has a generous amount of bronze braze penetrating throughout the junction. Contributing factor to the original failure was likely due to my conversion of the bike to cantilever brakes. I removed of the original crown mounted brake with its mounting bolt that passed through the crown and steer tube, then the original poorly brazed crown was more free to work apart.