Who
We are Gianni Pegoretti, Antonio Attanasio and Matt Cazzaniga. 3 people with the itch to do something different and go against the currents of the big fish.
Where our frames are made
Pergine Valsugana, Italy.
When we started DeAnima it was immediately clear that what ever we made had to be produced by us, fruits of our ideas, a reflection of what we believe in. When we talk about produced by us we mean made with our hands by one of us, not designed by us and made in a far away land. To get to the frames we have today has taken many years and multiple designs. Its not been easy, we studied and designed, its not just all about manufacturing processes, its also about applying knowledge to new materials with new possibilities. Its also been about keeping traditional Italian skills alive which have in the last 2 decades been largely forgotten.
How our frames are made
Carbon.
Made from carbon fibre fabric and joined using wrapped carbon joints. The use of carbon fibre is not something you learn overnight, we started using carbon fibre at the beginning of 2000 when carbon fibre made its entry into the world of cycling. Everything is born with the design of the tubes and the construction of the moulds. Very important is how the layers of carbon fibre are laid up in the moulds, the layup has a big effect on the rigidity of the structure. The production of a frame starts by mitering the tubes to the required design, inserting them into the frame jig and bonding the joints. Once the frame has been been cooked in the oven the frame is removed from the jig and the joints are then wrapped with carbon fabric impregnated with resin (prepeg). The frame is then bagged, the air removed, and put in the oven to be cooked. Once removed from the oven we then lightly sandpaper the wrapped joints and a coat of resin is applied. The frame is then sandpapered all over, checked for alignment and finishing before being painted.
TIG Steel.
This is where it all started for us – tubes of steel and TIG welding. Its a simple and pure form of building a frame. When we decided that we would like to make a steel frame we knew one thing that we did not want to do was what everyone else was doing – taking one of the very few steel tubesets still available and making a frame – that did not appeal – we did not see the point of making a frame and ignoring the advancements that had come about since we had last worked with steel. We decided that if we were to do a steel frame then we needed to get back in touch with the people that we used to work with – the Locatelli brothers who own Dedacciai. So one grey misty winter morning we headed down to flat lands east of Milan and stood in a semi silent factory and explained to ‘Ingegnere’ what we had in mind – we explained and he listened – he immediately disappeared into a store room and came back with some raw tubes and started putting dyes on to hydraulic rams and forming what we had in mind. This is how our first steel frame, the DeFer, was born.
