1980’s Tecnotrat Oria

Greg brought this beauty in one day after we had been yarning about all things bike. Originally a mid range Italian steel road bike, it was looking a little neglected. 

The frame is Italian, built by Tecnotrat, probably in the mid to late 1980’s. They built frames in Cuneo (NW Italy, not far from Nice on the Mediterranean coast). Most of the frames were for bike shops that often put their own logo/decals on them, but not this one. 

The onion bag paint job is a common design on Italian bikes of the period and it pretty eye-catching. While I thought about repainting it, nobody was eally interested in trying to reproduce the onion bag effect.

In Italy, there are still a lot of these bikes around and I imagine back in the 1980s and 90s they would have been as ubiquitous as a Melvern Star here in Australia. Outside of Italy, they are much less common, but do show up from time to time. although I have only seen one other come through the shop.  

Greg wanted to convert the bike into a single speed that he could ride to work and ride on short trips around town. So we stripped it down and cleaned the bike of 30 years of accumulated grime, cleaned and polished the original downtube shifters, brake levers and brake calipers and refitted those, fitted a new sealed bearing bottom bracket and single speed crankset, swapped out the old tubular rims for a new pair of alloy rims with 28mm Fyxation tyres and added a new white classic button Fyxation saddle. 

The hardest bit was sourcing the white brake hoods – finally found online, appropriately in Italy. Combined with the white bar tapes we think it looks pretty good!

A few years later ….

A few years later Greg had sold the bike and the new owner brought it into the shop to get it “restored.” That was going to be a bit of a challenge since we didn’t have the original groupset or wheels, but we agreed to build it to something close to what would have been on it originally. There was also a bit of a budget constraint 🙂

While some of the cool bits like the downtube shifters were still on the bike, the crankset and derailleurs were long gone. so we had a bit of a fossick through the parts collection to find something that would work and fitted a air of black road tyres and a bidon cage to get Peter rolling.

Since then we have replaced a couple of parts as better options turned up or he has worn something out and now he’s a regular on the Ballina Bicycle Club Vintage Steel rides.

Tecnotrat History & Links

Tecnotrat was an OEM bicycle frame manufacturer in Cuneo, Italy. They generally built generic, unbranded frames for sale toother companies, mainly bike shops, who branded them with their own labels and built them up for sale. Probably the most famous of these was Giuseppe Saronni, world road champion, sponsored by Colnago, who also made bikes for him and on whose bikes he rode to victory.

In Italy, Tecnotrat bike/frames are very common, but they are much less common elsewhere.

The company seems to have “disappeared” in the late 1990s or early 2000s and information on the company is increasingly hard to find.

Please let me know if you have any good links or additional information.