Originally Posted by
VintageTTfan
These are very cool and utterly early examples of TT's! Wow. These pictures I have never seen. I love the drama on the faces of the racers. These are very cool bikes and they move the dates back a couple years it looks like. Thanks and please post some more cool pictures. Have a great day. P.S. Can you please post in a reply a link to your sources for these pictures and information. It would help educate me and others. Thanks.
sure, the upper pic is from the Assos company website, and the other i found at a "Textima"-related website. (There are a few but all of them in german i fear)
The history of Textima is fascinating:
Given the very limited resources at hand in the former GDR, what they achieved is nothing short of amazing. They couldn't just buy the newest and best, so they had to be ingenious. They went to wind tunnels, they mixed tubesets, they hand-rolled Reynolds tubes to oval shape and hand-flattened spokes.One of them, Pyttel, is still active with a bike shop in Rastatt near Karlsruhe. He does framebuilding classes in his Textima- and FES-decorated shop which are rumoured to have very long class days ending with story telling. Olaf Ludwig lives nearby and often drops in.
Ludwig, Altig, Pyttel
Cycling legends Olaf Ludwig, Rudi Altig, Christian Pyttel in Pyttels shop. On the wall an German olympic team FES road team TT bike.