Hi,

I'm looking at a reasonably good looking SOMEC road bike, on a local second hand website.
The seller claims the frame is a Columbus SL frame, and from what I can see from his pictures, the Columbus decal looks like this:



Did Columbus SL tubing decals look like this, at one point?

Thanks.

Yes, indeed. It's a decal that could also go with SP tubing (which might be used on a larger frame, say 59cm and up) or on a frame that mixed both SL and SP tubes. The dates during which this style was used are subject to the whims and stock of the builder, but the design of the Columbus decal changed around the mid 1980s...their 1979 catalog shows this "older" style but they were starting to add new tubing models and descriptors to those decals.

So this is the "newer" style one? And only denotes SL or SP? Learn something new every day on this site.

Until the mid 1980s, almost all Columbus tube sets used the same decal. In the 1970s and earlier, it was a foil decal, in the 80s it changed to the one you pictured, and only after that did the decals distinguish between SL, SP, SLX, KL, etc.

It does denote a frame built of SL and/or SP, but I don't call it "newer" style...there's an older (foil) decal, and then there's this mid-80s NEW style:

Thanks, guys.

I have no input but dig your username

The Hillary Stone site you got that image from told you what tubesets that decal represented; see this again: https://hilarystone.com/decals3.html

Whoops, that's right
I got the image from google image search, and took the image without going to the website it linked to.