About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provoking imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
Step back into the workshop of Spécialités TA, the small Clamart firm whose duralumin chainrings and cranksets carried some of the biggest names in cycling for over seventy years. This gallery gathers the company’s period advertisements, catalog pages and technical…
All About the Francs, and Palmarès Very few marques from classic cycling’s golden years are as simultaneously transparent and opaque as Cycles Mercier. Wonderful examples of the company’s craftmanship abound in their namesake bicycles, spanning the pre-War 1920s through the…
The story of Cycles Mercier is inextricably linked to its master strategy of brand management and horizontal integration, a philosophy that ensured its longevity even as smaller rivals struggled to survive. Over its 66-year reign, Mercier established no fewer than…
The storied history of Cycles Mercier spans well over a century now, marked by rapid industrialization, a long-running racing dynasty, pioneering technical innovations (like the Méca Dural frame), and dramatic corporate collapses and revivals (note the use of plurals here).…
MAFAC’s story is that of a specialist brake innovator facing the rise of integrated groupsets. For 20 prosperous years, MAFAC filled a crucial gap by creating brakes—like the pioneering Criterium cantilever and revolutionary Racer center-pull models—that were revolutionary in their…
Introducing MAFAC In the historical archive of classic lightweight and vintage bicycles, some components get relegated to lowly footnote status, while others stand tall as towering monuments to engineering achievement. Among the latter, the name MAFAC—an acronym derived from the…
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