Before
@Henry Hub discovered the Aquillon during his trawling of London charity shops 7 or 8 years ago, then posting it here for all of us to gawk at, I was not aware that this brand existed. However, I had known through my earlier patent search that a resident of Semeac by the name of Paul Lafourcade had been working on a synthetic racquet design since the early '70s. I had assumed that Lafourcade was responsible for the Desporte/Bagheera design at the time, because one of his patent drawings shared several unique visual details with that particular racquet, but once I realized that he made and sold racquets under his own name, I became a lot less comfortable with my assumptions.
Indeed, your comments regarding this brand in the older thread were what drove me to hunt for and study these racquets. I ended up getting an Aquillon, a Rafale (also injection-molded from Rilsan like the Aquillon, but with a smaller head), a Prestige (aluminum), a Fibre Verre (aluminum with fiberglass reinforcement) and a Fibre Carbone (same as Fibre Verre, but with carbon fiber reinforcement in lieu of fiberglass). There was at least one additional model in the injection-molded Rilsan line called SRT that I am still looking for, with a standard-sized head and closed-throat, and a bunch of fiber-reinforced wooden models rounding out the full product line.
One French seller told me that Lafourcade the manufacturer was based in Tarbes rather than Lyon. This makes sense to me, as Lafourcade the inventor lived in Semeac, and his patent agent operated from Toulouse. He took out patents in France, Germany and the UK in 1975-1976, but not in the US, at least not successfully, though his trademark was active in the US between 1979 and 1988, so he might have sold some goods here, whether or not it involved tennis racquets.
While Lafourcade’s patents described fully synthetic frames made out of U or I-beam shaped cores wrapped in fiber sheathes, the actual products that matched these patents were all aluminum-cored, whereas his fully synthetic injection-molded models had nothing to do with these patents and were probably not patentable due to their generic manufacturing method. Rilsan was an excellent material for making electrical junction boxes and even rifle stocks, but without the magic that Dunlop infused within the 200G architecture at around the same time, it could do no better than Nylon as a frame material through the conventional injection-molding approach that Lafourcade undertook. Both the Aquillon and Rafale are too flexible (16 and 32 RA, respectively) to meet the needs of competitive players. The aluminum-cored models played better (I think Pascal Portes used a "Fibre Carbone"?), but they were never going to challenge the rising dominance of fully synthetic graphite frames from the moment they were born.
