For fine Italian steel bikes only one tube maker will do:Columbus.But, as Cyclist discovers,the company is as much about modern technology as artisan craftsmanship
s I walk into Columbus HQ, just outside Milan and 45km south of the Eastern Alps, I encounter an enormous canvas. It’s a painting of a high-rise apartment building saturated in the red light of sunrise. A sleeping woman lies in the foreground and in the background a man leaps, arms spread like wings, from the balcony.
It’s all rather fanciful and surreal, and I wonder if I’m in the right place. I expected the headquarters of a company that specialises in metal tubing to be stark and industrial, but I’m soon to discover that the world of steel is a surprisingly complex and beguiling realm.
Steel is like water,’ says Paolo Erzegovesi, CEO of Columbus. ‘The rules are exactly the same rules that we have to consider when water moves in the tube or channel. It’s a fluid.’
Erzegovesi is doing his best to explain the company’s intriguing manipulation of steel – processes that take raw unfinished tubes and refine them for framebuilders to turn into top tubes, down tubes, stays, head tubes and other frame parts in everything from the entry level to the highest tier of custom bespoke bicycles.
At one machine, I watch as a short steel tube with a rough chalky finish is pushed through a circular die. What emerges out of the other side appears to be an entirely new material. It’s now mirror-smooth, black and nearly twice as long. It has a greater internal diameter, thinner walls and a new exterior finish, all without one degree of heat applied – using just pressure. This ‘cold drawing’ creates new shapes and dimensions, but is also used to butt the tubes, creating a variable wall thickness from end to centre.
Bu hikaye Cyclist dergisinin August 2016 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Cyclist dergisinin August 2016 sayısından alınmıştır.
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