# 80s Bianchi Limited - Japanese/Italian



## SantaCruz (Mar 22, 2002)

Regarding an early-mid 80s Bianchi Limited. 
The frame is labeled “Bianchi SuperSet” and the fork is Ishiwata 022 with “B” on stamped on fork crown & “Bianchi” on the seatstay caps. Here’s a link to one on Velospace including spec (my pics below) http://velospace.org/node/36818

Questions: Year of manufacture? Was the frame made in Italy? Was the bike assembled in Italy? 

Reason for the questions – I had presumed the bike to be an ‘84 Limited (ser # BS450474), designed in Italy but produced/painted/assembled in Japan and shipped to the US. Over the weekend, I ran across a reference that said Bianchi sourced tubing & components from Japan, for their second tier frames but initially, on the Limited model (not every mid-tier model) all the work was done in Italy; it added that transfer to Japan for manufacturing the Limited started in 85/86. Early years (Italian made frames) supposedly had the cable routing guides brazed at the bottom of the ST and only a single bottle mount on the DT. Later models (Japanese made frames) had cables routed under the BB and a second set of bottle mounts. 

So I don’t know what to believe regarding the origins of this bike. Can you help?

Here’s my rainy day beater


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## zmudshark (Jan 28, 2007)

Ishiwata tubing means Japanese built, from the little I know about this era Bianchi. I had an Italian built one pass through my hands last year. It had under the BB cable routing and one water bottle braze on, Columbus tubing. 

The Japanese were supposed to be better finished than the Italian.


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