A post from Italy

Remigio Maladino mailed me some interesting pictures of a plywood velomobile:



He writes: "All three vehicles (one velomobile, one trike without fairing but quite interesting for the very accurate construction, and an original plane-bycicle toy made during the fascist period) in the pictures are currently for sale in a carrozzeria in my town, Treviso. Only for my curiosity I asked about prices at the beginning of Summer. The owner said he paid nearly 20.000 euro for the lot. I don't know if I had to believe it or not and in any case I was not at all interested in buying it, I was only very interested about the peculiar shape and especially about the technical solutions of the two trikes: The one I sent you the first pictures is very interesting, I suppose also for you  for the fact that the wood body was surely built around a former, a shape with different layers of veneered  wood, not plywood like your velomobile. In this way it was possible to have double curved sheets but at the price of a much higher quantity of work.

It was interesting for me to see that you had the privilege of working and developing the Alleweder. I agree with you when you say that the great success of the diy kits was probably due to the self satisfaction that may derive to build your own velomobile. In addition to that there is alsothe fact that it can be forwarded all over the world with three boxes, or like some say that it can be easily Ups-able!

The wooden velomobile in the picture as i already told you was built by an independent mechanical engineer - sorry I forgot the name at the moment  (will probably ask it tomorrow and let you know more) in the Torino area in the seventies. In the other pictures you can spot the engineer with the famous, at least for me -and at that time younger- designer Giorgetto Giugiaro (VW Golf, Fiat Panda, Fiat Punto etc)."

I like the craftmanship of this machine. It must have taken  a tremendous effort to design and built it. The design was made in the 70-ties but it associate it with the 30-ties. Before Dupont and the like developed glass fiber reinforced polyester. It shows some resemblance with the work of Harald Winkler.