Design & manufacturing

Design & manufacturing

It starts with experience. From over 55 years of building bicycles for the world’s best cyclists, we know that a racing bicycle has to be stiff, light, accurate-handing and above all safe. Our frame designs balance these factors while taking advantage of the latest advances in materials and construction to create uncompromising, state-of-the-art bicycles.

From computer-aided designs, we work with our composite suppliers to create the unique molds for our EPS lugs and for frames like the CX-1 which have one-piece front triangles. Only by controlling every aspect of the design and manufacture of these vital parts can we make a carbon composite frame that lives up to the Colnago badge.

EPS frames are still fully manufactured in Cambiago, while other carbon frames come here for the all-important finishing and painting steps. Even our more affordable complete bicycles go through rigorous quality control before they’re shipped to your dealer.

Our special paint process creates stunning-looking bicycles. Rather than use decals that fade and peel, we create our colour panels with paint, carefully masking areas of the frame in a multi-step process. It takes longer, but the result is a frame that looks as good as it rides, and that will stay looking good for years.

Paint Process

It's not enough for a bicycle to be beautiful: it also has to look beautiful.

Colnago frames are hand painted and, as a result, every one is unique. Your bicycle is painted by the same craftsmen who paint frames for the professional riders of Bbox Bouygues Telecom and Colnago – CSF Inox.

A Colnago paint finish is an intricate and beautiful job. Except for the head badge, none of the coloured areas or logos on a Colnago frame is a stick-on decal; all are the result of the painstaking skill of our paint team.

The paint process starts with masking tape and thread protectors to keep paint out of the parts of the frame where none is needed. Then, we apply a layer of special primer that helps the outer layers bond to the carbon fiber.

When the primer has been dried in an oven at 50 Celsius, the painter applies laser-cut masking decals and then adds the first layer of paint. Several more masking steps and layers of paint go to build up the eventual colour scheme.

In time, the masks are all removed to reveal the final finish. The only remaining step is to coat the whole frame in a layer of lacquer that stops the ultra-violet rays in sunlight from fading the paint and helps protect the more intricate areas from damage.

For 2010 we have introduced metallic paint options for some frames. It's not enough for us to innovate in the technology of our frames, we want to make them more beautiful too

ISO 9001 Quality Control

Colnago is one of the few bicycle manufacturers in the world with an ISO 9001 certificate. This indicates the standard of our product development process and production processes.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the only worldwide organization that offers certification in quality standards, both in product development (thus regarding the safety and quality of the material used in construction) as well as the quality, safety and reliability of each element used in production.

Once a company obtains ISO 9001 certification, they must be re-certified year after year with a continuous investment in resources and machinery.

Colnago is one of the few ISO 9001 certified companies that uses both types of testing for certification. We test on laboratory machines and via product field testing by our sponsored professional teams.

Laboratory tests that follow well defined and accepted ISO 9001 tests are performed on finished products.

To perform these ISO 9001 tests, Colnago has a variety of electromechanical, pneumatic and other custom-designed test machines that perform a variety of static and dynamic stress tests on our frames. This enables us to test a wide variety of factors that make a Colnago the safest, most reliable frame available.

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