I'm a thirty six-year-old father of two. I am middle-class and live in an expensive area. I ride a lot and have too many bikes. My wife says I'm a packrat, and my garage reflects that. I have an almost non-existant "fun" budget. I like classic road bikes. I can't just drop $1000 or more on a nice classic when it goes by, as it would cause significant marital discord. So I have to collect within my budget, looking for deals and stuff that is definitely at the bottom or below Chuck's hierarchical list. :) I collect for my own pleasure. With one or two exceptions I have no plans of ever selling my bikes. (We all have those transients in our collections, I bet.)
I've been lucky enough to find some really nice bikes/frames, cheap. Two of my prized finds are a Carlsbad Masi frameset and a mid-70s Pogliaghi frameset, both my size, and both _just_ within the financial boundaries of my happy marriage. Both had something wrong with them. (Masi had later braze-on work and nickel plating with rust blooming in some spots, Pogliaghi had a cracked downtube and some maybe non-original braze-ons and non-original paint/decals.) There's no question in my mind that these framesets needed restoring. I sent them to the best guy for the job that I knew, Ed Litton. They will come out with beautiful paint and the right decals and the right braze-ons and I will be happy. Ed is truly a keeper of the flame. He loves classic bikes too, is happy to teach a newbie like me what's what, and his shop restores bikes that might fell through the cracks - like mine - back to glory. These framesets will have no patina, probably greatly diminished mojo in the eyes of some, but I'll still be happily married. The paint won't be thick imron, but just-right PPG, I think. Hell, Ed painted some of the original Carlsbad Masis. I will scrounge parts that are basically correct, but there's little likelihood of me getting all-1975 Campy parts for the Masi, nor of me affording show-winning NOS componentry either. I'll ride these bikes, I'll lend them to close friends and visitng family to ride. I may end up spending more than someone would spend to buy a complete original classic, but my wife won't see a $2000 purchase go by. (She'll see a year or three of smaller purchases go by. :)
I've got an old 1963 Peugeot PX-10E (Not sure on the "E".) that was bought by a listmember (and ebay ethicist) for about $400, then parted out and sold piecemeal on ebay to the kauzos of the world for over $1500. I ended up with the battered frameset and a few unsaleable bits for about $75. There's no way I can afford the Simplex Raid 61 derailleur or Stronglight 57 crankset or aluminum-railed Ideale saddle that were on it, but I'm scrounging interesting, roughly period-correct parts (Stronglight 49d cranks, lower-tier steel simplex derailleurs, some wingnut-qr Normandy hubs, Ideale 80 saddle, etc.) that will make this bike rideable again, and it will be charming and French and fun to ride.
I'm sure there are more people like me on this list. We love old bikes, we do our best to reclaim, restore and renovate old bikes, but we do it on a budget and we do the best we can with what we've got. I wasn't riding or even alive when some of you were acquiring and riding this stuff. Perhaps someday I'll have the cash to drop on the dream bikes I see and hear about on this list, but for now I can only do my best.
One of my winter project is to finish building a Molteni Merckx (also an Ed Litton restoration) with scrounged Super Record and ride it. I'm looking forward to riding it with people I've met on this list.
Morgan -- Morgan Fletcher, morgan@hahaha.org Oakland, CA