Chuck Kichline wrote:
>
> When I started riding again in the 80's the bargain quality bike
> frames were "Old, worn out racing frames", generally a year or two
> old and Reynolds or Columbus tube. I was told many times that even
> the power of amateur riders took the temper out of the tube and
> turned them into flexible flyers.
> I was never a racer and picked up a few and built them back up and
> never noticed anything wrong with them, but never had a NEW one,
> either. (I sure have found a lot of bikes with sloppy loose spokes
> though)
>
> So, do old bike frames lose their sharpness? Maybe this has already
> been beat to death in the archive.
Here's a reply I fished out of the archives: ======================================================================== Ah yessss... I remember a trip to sunny Italy in the seventies and a highly anticipated visit to Molteni Arcore. Out behind the warehouse that housed the team bike spares, etc. (you should have seen the shelves of wool jerseys with one entire shelf of Molteni jerseys with the worlds bands on the collar and sleeves reserved for Eddy himself)... anyway out behind the warehouse was this field of waist high weeds, and in the middle of this field was a big soggy mound of all these orange painted bike frames, the steel tubes of which were reduced to so much limp pasta by the herculean efforts of Eddy and his domestics in the previous season's races.
Chuck "huh?" Schmidt SoPas, SoCal ========================================================================
"...fishing the past, from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth." --Kurt Vonnegut
Chuck Schmidt South Pasadena, Southern California
.