Belle Epoca
Little more than a decade old, yet with 70 years in the business, Epoca is one of few true ‘made in Italy’ framebuilders left, and it’s prepared to tell you its secrets…
Despite being barely 10 years old, Epoca has more than 70 years’ experience of building beautiful frames in Italy. Here’s how…
Eddy used to drive down here in his Audi, a special racing version with a 500 horsepower engine and paddle-shifters. He used to say he never worried about speeding because he had Belgian plates, and this was Italy. We’d talk about frames, then have some beers – he used to kill me drinking! I remember he had this spot around the side of the workshop where he’d go for a piss. He never liked driving back much, though. He used to make me take him to the airport.’
Whether a hangover was responsible for the preference to fly, Valentino Stocchero can’t, or maybe won’t, say. But what he is only too happy to discuss is his framebuilding business’s involvement with Eddy Merckx Cycles, along with a host of other notables that might surprise the ardent bicycle tifosi.
Fire, bombs and winning
Epoca Bikes was founded in 2006, yet it proudly bears the tagline Fatto a mano dal 1952 La Ver Mec: ‘Handmade since 1952’. The reason being that while the brand might be young, it comes from a family stable of builders with a long history of fabricating frames here in Rosa, at the foot of the Venetian Prealps.
‘My wife’s father, Mario, officially founded the La Ver Mec in 1952, but he’s been building frames here since 1948, and I’ve been here for 26 years. I used to do some consultant work as a designer for Mario, and that’s how I met Patrizia and got involved here as a framebuilder,’ says Stocchero. ‘La Ver Mec stands for La Vernice Meccanica, or the mechanical and paint workshop. There was no electricity so they used light from the fire, which they’d braze in like blacksmiths. They collected the filler for brazing from the remnants of Second World War bombs.’
Looking around the cavernous workshop it’s not impossible to imagine. The huge roller doors are wide open, and if there are any fancy extraction units or high-powered lights they’re not in use today. A cool
‘There was no electricity so they used light from the fire, which they’d braze in’
breeze flows across the dimly lit floor, the only sound it carries the faint rush of burning acetylene from a brazing torch. As workshops go, this is as peaceful and, perhaps, as honest as they come. Yet it belies a host of treasures, past and present.
‘This is one of our most special jigs,’ says Stocchero. ‘It’s a Marchetti, made in Bergamo, one of the most accurate jigs you can find, even though it’s pretty old. On it we’ve built bikes for Merckx, Ridley, Wilier, Fondriest, Cinelli, Moser, Vitus, Time, Casati, Orbea… We built bikes that Hinault rode, Pozzato rode, and on this very jig we built Servais Knaven’s Merckx bike that won Paris-roubaix in 2001. I still have all the invoices in my office to prove it!’
Proudly displayed on the reverse of the jig is a signed poster of a mudcaked Knaven on his Domo-farm Frites liveried machine, and while it’s well over a decade ago it’s no less curious to think that at the turn of the millennium big races were still being won on aluminium bikes. Carbon, of course, quickly became king, and it was the advent of this material that urged Epoca into existence.
‘We started life as contractors – terzisti – building frames for other people. In our heyday La Ver Mec had 30 employees across several buildings, and we’d be turning out 800 frames per week, just for a client like Merckx. We’d be making so many that often we’d mitre and tack up the tubes here, then send them off to other contract shops nearby to be welded.
‘The frames would go off in lorries. Merckx and Ridley took them to be painted at their facilities in Belgium, others would paint them here in Italy or we’d paint some ourselves. That was the golden age that lasted up until the late 1990s. But as aluminium grew and then carbon fibre dominated, our contract work started to dry up when brands looked to the Far East.’
La Ver Mec still does contract work – it’s currently making showpiece bikes for Maserati, in steel, and Alfa Romeo, in carbon – and a nose around the workshop digs up all manner of aluminium fixie frames, e-bike frames and even a prototype recycling-compactor bike, which Stocchero hopes might one day replace larger refuse-collecting vehicles in crowded cities. But the
‘We’ve built bikes for Merckx, Ridley, Wilier, Fondriest, Cinelli, Moser, Vitus, Time, Cassati, Orbea...’
last big racing bike contract came and went with Wilier a few years back, where La Ver Mec made a re-release of its ‘Ramato’ coloured Superleggera steel racer, as well as some of Wilier’s high-end carbon team bikes.
‘We knew the boom was coming to an end one year at the Milan trade show. It must have been in the mid2000s. There used to be this big room exclusively filled with Italian cycling brands, and suddenly Giant was in it. At that point everyone knew Ernesto had made a deal with Giant for them to make his bikes. This is Colnago, the man who once bought all the garages under his apartment block so he could make his frames there. The only frame Colnago makes here now is the C60, and even that is made by an Italian contractor.’
Stocchero’s response was to convince Mario Bittante, La Ver Mec’s founder, to create an in-house brand making high-end, custom carbon frames, which they would name Epoca. It was a hard decision.
‘The older generations weren’t so worried, but when I worked with the big brands under the younger generations they wanted to keep everything secret about who was really making their bikes. If one found out I was making bikes for another, they wouldn’t speak to me, whereas a brand like Wilier would wish me luck. So the decision to start Epoca was a very difficult one to make. We didn’t want to upset our remaining clients, but then at a certain point the order books said we had to.’
It’s the way we make ’em
Fabrication is as one might expect for a custom builder. Epocas are made using tube-to-tube construction, where carbon fibre tubes are bought in externally, cut, mitred, tacked, wrapped and cured to form a madeto-measure frame. While the larger factories will be turning out moulded monocoque frames, Stocchero insists tube-to-tube produces the best frames, and that his process has some unique touches.
‘My business is craft. I see many carbon frames come in for repair and you’d be amazed at the amount of filler used to cover up imperfect seams and joints, and the amount of excess resin. Filler isn’t strong or very light! A properly wrapped joint will require no filler and will be stronger than any monocoque frame, because it can be reinforced in the crucial areas. We are a bit like tailors. We use around 160 specially cut pieces of carbon pre-preg sheets to build up three layers around our tubes for stiffness and strength. It’s very hard to control the wall thickness like this in a monocoque frame, and to know what has gone on inside the tubes.
‘It is also far too expensive to offer custom geometry with monocoque frames, as each requires its own mould, but custom is crucial. Nothing will make you as fast as having a properly fitted bike that is comfortable and fits your morphology to allow you to maximise your power.’
Then, to illustrate these points, Stocchero produces two tubes cut in cross section. One, cut from a stock monocoque frame, shows distinctly varied wall thicknesses as well as some delamination of the innermost layers. The other tube is of similar dimensions but one Epoca gets made locally to Stocchero’s design. It is, of course, entirely uniform and clean.
‘Look how you can squeeze this one and it flexes,’ he says of the stock tube. ‘Do you want to ride a bike you could crush with your hand? We also put Kevlar in our tubes, to help impact strength and to dampen vibrations.’
There will no doubt be myriad manufacturers that would offer up their bikes for closer inspection, but the point remains, Stocchero’s ingredients and execution are topnotch. And it’s hard to doubt a man who’s built bikes for Bernard Hinault. Yet the question remains, if the frames are this good, why is Epoca a relative unknown beyond its home turf?
Everyone knows everyone
It’s not a much-discussed facet of the business, but a major hurdle
‘Nothing will make you as fast as having a properly fitted bike’
facing any brand is marketing and distribution. After all, if no one has heard about you or can obtain your product readily, how is it going to sell? Thus, in 2014 two experienced hands arrived in a bid to bring Epoca to a wider audience, and with them came an even more tangled web of Italian manufacture.
‘Effectively Epoca was a factory outlet to begin with – you just came in to the workshop and ordered a bike from Valentino,’ says Ali Katir, who together with business partner Peter Cole now owns a stake in the business. The duo met in 2007 when Katir bought a custom Viner bike from Cole, Viner’s then-distributor, and latterly went into business together distributing other brands, notably Marco Bertoletti’s Legend.
‘It’s a great relationship with Epoca and a great company to be involved with,’ says Katir. ‘We have a wide open door policy, and we invite all of our customers to come here. Very few companies can say that.’
Beginning of an era
Thus far it would appear things are working well in this ‘phase two’ of Epoca’s life. Katir says it is selling 300 frames per year and is expanding the range with steel and more carbon models. That’s good news all round, but it’s Stocchero who seems the happiest. Picking up a finished frame like an art critic appraising a painting, he grins broadly.
‘I never did make frames for Colnago,’ he says, ‘but we know each other well, and every time I see Ernesto he says, “Valentino, save a space for me in production!”’
One gets the sense that no matter how successful Epoca ends up being, Stocchero still would. James Spender is features editor of Cyclist, where there is always a job for Ernesto Colnago in production
‘We have a wide open door policy and invite all of our customers here’