History
Lunetten bike is cooperating with Jan Kole,
a passiionate cyclist, racer and frame builder known as
'Steel Man', whom started making handmade cromoly customized frame sets in 1982.
The following history is his bicycle life story as told by Jan, written by Lin Ruobai.
when I met Jan Raas again, who was at that time the National Dutch champion in road cycling.
I had a normal life at that time, played soccer in the club of the small city I lived at that time, not professional, but just under that level.
Jan Raas challenged me to go out training with them,
which I did and went out with Jan Raas, Cees Priem, Cees Bal and Jos Schipper,
which were professional road racers at that time
, on a borrowed racing bike, because I didn’t have one, in the snow, for a training of about 80km,
that was my real first long ride, and since that time the bicycle became my passion.
The great Jan Raas who fired the Kole's passion for cycling. Image sportgeschiedenis.nl
Started racing as an amateur for 3 years,
training every day with those racers and became a professional road racer for 3 years.
I was not a top racer, but raced many big races - ofcourse it was a beautiful time!
We had many accomplished professionals in Holland as I have already mentioned,
but I also think also about Joop Zoetemelk, Hennie Kuiper, Johan van der Velde,
Peter Winnen, Gerrie Kneteman, and of course many very good racers in Belgium
and from other countries, such as Bernard Hinault, Francesco Moser, Gianni Bugno
and many more.
These were the golden years of bicycle racing and
I am proud to have taken part as our sport grew.
In 1981 I had to stop racing,
because of a rather serious crash and had to have an operation at my shoulder
and started to make customized hand made frame sets,
learned this by moving around to many frame makers
and of course also at some local frame makers as Jaap Huissoon,
who always made my frame sets and Sjaak van der Klundert,
both also rather good former professional racers.
Local frame maker Jaap Huissoon also influenced Jan Kole.
Huissoon was also a successful pro riding from 1958 – 1960
with Magneet and Locomotief
Started also a distribution company in Holland and distributed many well known products at that time, started also importing from Taiwan and got to know the products better and better, as well as the factories.
I was asked by some bicycle companies in Holland, Belgium, and Taiwan,
because I knew frame making very well, to help them to move their frame set production
firstly to Taiwan and then in 1994 to China.
These weren't racing bikes, but standard commuter bikes.
I assisted to move production for brands like Union, Oxford, Sparta and Batavus to China
and started up the production for aluminum frames in China in the early 1990's
. I also continued the customized hand mades in China, for some friends.
In 2006 I started up a distribution company in Hong Kong
, and became the distributor for China for Cannondale, Campagnolo,
Challenge, Oval, Miche, FFWD and several other brands,
and started my small frame factory , where I have a customized hand made department,
where we make hand made frame sets according to the old school,
and as they were made earlier in Italy.
We also have a production department,
where we make the frame sets in the way that many other companies call hand made –
it isn't as custom as our in-house, so we call this 'production'.
In both departments we make frame sets for many famous brands.
We pay a lot of attention to the quality and finishing of the frame sets.
2009 was an exciting year as we started sponsoring a Belgian Continental team called Profel-Colossi. They rode an amazing 2009 and similar to our other team riders they did it on our steel frame sets. Our sponsorship will continue through 2010.
