SPEAKING OF THAT ROSSIN BUILD...

As a kid, this ad and the cover of the July 1987 Cyclist magazine had me drooling over the Rossin Ghibli... the kind of name that seemed to translate into "best bike ever" in my pre-fluent Italian mind. A bike model that meant something, like the Tommasini Velocista, the Cinelli Laser, or a Somec Promax. OK, well at least these names meant something to me as a teen... a beautiful bike I'd never be able to afford.

Funny thing about adulthood - you can finally afford the things you dreamt about as a kid, but the means to that end is that you ran out of time to enjoy those things!

eBay is what eBay is. Namely, a rabbit hole of bike geek stuff begging me to spend my money on yet another money pit bike. Ghibli's don't pop up too often and when they do, they look like this...

Meet my next money pit. Yep, I overspent for this and will continue to overspend so I can turn THAT... into this...

The most iconic, beautiful, unobtainable Italian bike of my youth. BUT, it won't be just a Rossin Ghibli. I intend to build this up with the most ridiculous mix of parts from Campy's lost years: Croce d'Aune derailleur with Syncro shifters, Delta brakes, SGR pedals, Elekta saddle and biodynamic bottles. Quite possibly the heaviest and least functional assembly of parts to come out of the cathedral of Vicenza, but also quite possibly the most beautiful bike parts ever made. This thing may weight close to twenty five pounds, but it'll be the sweetest twenty-five pound bike ever made!

BACK IN 2016 WITH MY CAMPY ALPHABET

A year is long enough, no? Actually, I've been rather busy in the world of vintage bikes, just not enough free time to type it all out and upload it. Maybe a facelift on the old blog will be enough to kick start me back into blogging shape.

With a new bike build project (more on the Rossin Ghibli soon) comes a new jersey design (more on those soon as well). With a new jersey design comes some time spent in Illustrator. While my hack skills are improving, I'm still a bit of a hack. But I won't let that stand in the way of (re)creating something that I found lacking online, which is a good vector or high res version of the Campy alphabet. After all, how hard is it to draw a white rectangle on a blue box?

According to campybike.com, these first appeared on the rims, bottle and lubricant brochures in (maybe) 1985 and used through 1991. With Shimano dominating click-shifting at the time and a number of truly unsuccessful products (but yet some real beautiful components and new ideas), I like to refer to this period as Campy's lost years. I was focused on Campy's mtb offerings at the time and have to say I never owned a pair of Syncro shifters or Delta brakes (until now, that is).

You'll start to see more of this alphabet on here as I document the Rossin build (provided I don't get too busy and lose another year of blogging).

Here is a link to the entire google image gallery.

Without further ado...