Frame Design

The per­fect bicy­cle must be bal­anced. It must be made to fit you, not the other way round. That’s why we make as wide a range of sizes as pos­si­ble of our frames, with 22 off-the-peg sizes in our C59 Italia and the option of cus­tom fit for rid­ers with spe­cial requirements.

Balanced han­dling is vital too. Colnago invented mod­ern bicy­cle rac­ing geom­e­try and has refined it to per­fec­tion with han­dling that is unwa­ver­ingly accu­rate but sta­ble at speed, so a long day in the moun­tains is a bat­tle against the gra­di­ent and your rivals, not against a twitchy bicycle.

Colnago ride qual­ity is rooted in the idea of bal­ance too. A frame must be stiff, to con­vey your power to the road, but it must not be harsh. Features like our 3PRS internally-ribbed tubes and over-sized chain­stays with leaf-shaped seat­stays simul­ta­ne­ously improve rigid­ity and dis­si­pate road shock.

Frame integrity is a cru­cial aspect of Colnago design. Our frames and forks are tested in the Colnago Lab to with­stand impacts far beyond inter­na­tional stan­dards, and to retain their strength after impact. That means your Colnago can still be rid­den to the fin­ish if the worst happens.

We’re always look­ing for ways to improve our frames. New ideas start with Ernesto Colnago’s sketches, and then computer-assisted design, finite ele­ment analy­sis, and rapid 3D pro­to­typ­ing allow us to test new ideas in days. Tomorrow’s Colnagos are already on the draw­ing board.
Find out more about our Technology

Disc Braking

WHY DISC BRAKE VS RIM BRAKE?

• Safety first:
  • No rim dam­age (spe­cially car­bon clincher beat or glue on tubular)
  • No pres­sure changes inside the tire (blow off the car­bon clincher)
• Same brak­ing per­for­mance in any condition
• Less rotat­ing iner­tia (rim weight sav­ing, moved the mass toward the rotat­ing axis)
• No weight penalty
• Aerodynamic and clean look­ing on front side
• Can run even on a non-straight rim (i.e. spoke failure)
• History of MTB already tells the way to go

Colnago’s disc brake fea­tures: higher piv­ot­ing, speed-lock avail­able (inter­nal rout­ing), wide range of lever reach adjust­ment, fin­ger clear­ance on top posi­tion (fore­fin­ger can hold the grip).

WHY HYDRAULIC DISC BRAKE INSTEAD OF MECHANICAL ACTUATED (CABLE)

• Weight sav­ing:
  • Hydraulic caliper is so much lighter (mechanical’s needs camshaft and rolling balls, exter­nal lever and slid­ing system)
  • Cable rout­ing: hydraulic hoses are super light com­pare to mechan­i­cal cable and hits rout­ing. Hydraulic hoses flex­i­bil­ity can’t be com­pare with mechanicals
• Much bet­ter behav­ior in dirty con­di­tions (i.e. cycle-cross)
• Self-pad’s wear­ing com­pen­sa­tion on hydraulic disc brake (mechan­i­cal needs to be hand adjusted often)
• Pistons on hydraulic caliper has a dou­ble sym­met­ric action (on mechan­i­cal only one pis­ton is mov­ing and bend the rotor toward the other, reduc­ing dras­ti­cally the rotor life in high tem­per­a­ture and torque stress)

Materials

Colnago was the first frame builder to see the poten­tial of car­bon fibre in the evo­lu­tion of the cycling. He chose to match the lat­est tech­nol­ogy with the con­cept of cus­tom geom­e­try frames. Muscular exten­sion, flex­i­bil­ity and per­sonal pref­er­ence for posi­tion com­bined with aer­o­bic and ped­alling effi­cien­cies are too many vari­ables for a rider to be locked into the con­fine­ment of only a few frame sizes. This is why all the top Colnago frames offer lugged con­struc­tion to fit all rid­ers. Whether for one of the 130 Colnago-sponsored pro­fes­sional cyclists or one of the mil­lions of demand­ing ama­teur rid­ers around the world, there is a Colnago that offers the per­fect fit. With this con­cept, Colnago takes age-old crafts­man­ship into the future.

Even with the vast avail­abil­ity of car­bon fibre, there are a num­ber of poten­tial prob­lems that can exist in the man­u­fac­tur­ing process. Only with great invest­ment in man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nol­ogy can a car­bon prod­uct be con­sid­ered safe and reli­able with no sac­ri­fice to per­for­mance. The tubes of Colnago frames are built with an advanced fil­a­ment wind­ing sys­tem. This process, which is per­formed over a solid, stain­less steel INOX core, yields a highly con­sis­tent wall thick­ness, even in cases where the tubes use intri­cate exter­nal and inter­nal shape and struc­ture. Moreover, thanks to the INOX “mir­ror treated” cores, all the dif­fer­ent lay­ers are com­pressed with extremely high pres­sures. This advanced process lim­its excess resin in the com­pos­ite, reduc­ing weight while increas­ing strength. This, plus advanced tube shap­ing and struc­ture, yield the high­est strength to weight ratio.