[CR]Old Soldiers: What to do with them?

(Example: Framebuilders:Bernard Carré)

From: <brucerobbins@supanet.com>
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 10:31:31 +0100
Subject: [CR]Old Soldiers: What to do with them?

Life's a bit hectic just now and I haven't been able to follow everything on the list so apologies if this has already been covered (can't get into the archives for some reason either right now).

I've got a couple of "old soldiers"-a 1949 Flying Scot path racer and a 1948 Hobbs Clubweight. The Scot has a fine patina of paint/rust (you can see it here: http://www.flying-scot.co.uk/frame_369q.html (mapped) but ignore the text as it was written when I was even more ignorant of old bikes than I am now) while the Hobbs is sort of pockmarked with rust spots. The problem is that there's too much original paint on both of them to have them re-enamelled.

The Hobbs rust "pattern" is such that I could probably touch-up most of the spots although it would take a while as there are so many but nothing can be done for the Scot. I've rubbed oil onto the Scot frame in the past as some sort of protection against the typical Scottish weather (it's been more like California for the last couple of months) but is there a better way of protecting what's there? Clearcoating looks a bit plasticky to me and it surely wouldn't be advisable on top of rust. Is the oil approach OK or is there a better way of neutralising the rust?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Bruce Dundee Scotland

P.S. I've enjoyed looking at the Bottecchia on Ebay. I always thought that I had little interest in Italian bikes but I now realise I've little interest in 1960s onwards Italian bikes. The Bottecchia is a cracker.