georges1

Good Morning
Found an interesting about older brands catalogues la bible du velo
Enjoy
Best regards
Georges

steelbikeguy

cool!
Lots of interesting stuff there! I've just been poking through the 1971 Carlton catalog and was surprised at what I found.

As a bit of background, Raleigh bought Carlton Cycles back in the 1960's (I think..) in order to have a range of high quality bikes. Their business had been more oriented towards roadsters and such, IIRC. Anyway.. the purchase of Carlton meant that the best Raleighs sold in the USA in the early 70's had a "Carlton" decal to show their heritage. For instance, here's the Carlton decal on my '74 Raleigh International..



I'd always heard that the Carlton-built models sold in the UK retained their Carlton badging, presumably to take advantage of the high value reputation of Carlton. A lot of model names were kept after the purchase by Raleigh too, such as the Team Professional, the International, the Competition, and probably others??

I'd assumed that they would keep the same color schemes too, but that doesn't seem to be the case, at least based on my review of the 1971 Carlton catalog.

One such case is the International... in the USA, they were a single color, and used "flamboyant" paint with a gold base layer and a tinted translucent top layer. This '71 Carlton International is still quite interesting with a white frame with red/green seat and head tubes.




The Raleigh Criterium is typically shown in USA catalogs in an overall black paint scheme. There were others, such as the elusive lilac Competition and the lagoon blue & white Competition with Nervex lugs (listmember Bernie has one! A beauty!)
The '71 Carlton Criterium has a lagoon blue scheme with contrasting panels on the seat and head tubes in yellow. It looks pretty good, IMHO! Love the matching mudguards too!




The Carlton catalog doesn't show a Professional model, but they did sell some top-end frames for road or track use. The road frame did offer the "Giro" seat cluster that was known as a "fastback seat stay" on the Professionals sold in the USA.

Here are the Carlton framesets....





and here's the USA Raleigh Professional in the '74 catalog...




One other detail that caught my attention is the somewhat low spec components on all but the Team Professional. As the photos of the International and Criterium show, they all have steel cottered cranks. I think(?) the 1971 Raleigh models sold in the USA had aluminum cotterless cranks. Maybe that says more about what the enthusiasts in each country could afford at that time?

Anyway, pretty fun to browse the catalogs and see what was going on back then!

Steve in Peoria

Bianchigirll 

I've seen that site before. I'm not sure about the other brands but the Bianchi catalogs appear to be under the wrong year, incomplete and don't say which country the sections are from

HeikoS69 

Thank you for the link.
I find my scans of Réne Herse catalogs there.
The scans where obviously downloaded from my Flickr page and than uploaded on his site.
You can read there: "An indispensable tool to keep up with the latest news, evolution and history of cycling."
There is a tremendous amount of time involved from my side in the scans.
I was never asked nor informed.
I wonder if other contributors where asked before.
Interesting....

steelbikeguy

I noticed that when I looked at the Carlton catalogs, there were links to the sites where some/all of the material was obtained.
One of these was Mark Bulgier's collection of catalogs, which includes a couple of Raleigh catalogs that I scanned and sent to Mark a long time ago. It's a huge collection of goodies that is worth browsing through. Mark's site does give credit to the people who scanned and provided the various catalogs and documents.

Anyway, when I looked at the Raleigh catalogs, I did find one of my scans there, so it definitely does use some of the material on Mark's site.

I think a better practice would be to provide links to the catalog of interest, instead of copying the information.
I do think that organizing the info from assorted collections of catalogs is helpful, though.

Steve in Peoria

sfazio 

Thank you so much for posting, what a wonderful resource.

SJX426 

It appears that cats earlier than 1981 are few and far between! I have yet to find one with my specific bike represented. If they exist, they are likely in Italy in the back of some shop.