Drake wrote:Hi,
What a pleasure it's been reading most of the contributions on this thread (got to page 10) .
I'd never heard of Viscounts before reading this thread,but what an impressive beautiful machine it looks . l should imagine just sitting on one would bring a smile to your face,let alone riding it .
Did i read (please excuse me if i've got this wrong) earlier that Yamaha took over Viscount . If that was the case,then what happened next . Did Yamaha still continue producing .
And the information relating to the light steel tubing used for the for the frames was very interesting . Is it still used by any frame builders these days .
I suppose i'm considered a bit of a dinosaur these days because i prefer steel frames to aluminium or composite,both of which have never floated my boat .
Yamaha NEVER owned Viscount. They had a contract with Viscount to import and distribute the bikes in the USA. That's all.
To be honest, Yamaha did not renew the contract with Viscount when they had the chance to. I suspect that they could see the impacts of the demise of the 10 speed racer boom looming on the horizon and bailed out. It turned out to be a shrewd business move. It was a disaster for Viscount though!
The frame tubing - Phoenix 1027 and Phoenix 101- was used by Falcon (VERY few people know this) and a few small English specialist frame builders e.g. Norman Fay. Sadly Phoenix tubing has not been around for many, many years. Perhaps there are stashes of it lying around in workshops somewhere? Would be nice if it was used to build new frames. I would buy it!