Original Message: ----------------- From: brad stockwell brdstockwell@yahoo.com Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 13:24:29 -0800 (PST) To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: [CR] Hacksawn Dropouts: A Smoking Gun?
"CR Folk:
There was a how-to article advocating the de-Simplexification-via-hacksaw of innocent French bikes in the December 1972 issue of Bike World, page 27:
"Converting From Simplex to Campy" by Kurt Miska"
Not to revisit this topic again, but was this indeed common then? Were French lightweights which were, I think, wonderfully "patriotic" in that they had almost all French components, at a disadvantage during the Bike Boom when the cognoscenti or wannabe cognoscenti just HAD to have Campagnolo components. It gets back to the thread about when and who and why "Campy" became a household name in the United States.
As a teen trying to save newspaper route money for these things, we all knew that if you wanted a "real" racing bike, a Gitane was cheap, a Peugeot a mite more but way cooler and then you had your Schwinns and Raleighs with their coveted Campy stuff which just cost a bomb in comparison. And I am not talking so much real quality differences here, just "But I gotta it..." marketing at work.
Here I again think Raleigh and others were smart. They stuck with making the frames and packaged the machine with sourced components. Only Raleigh did it better than most. But how many people could actually buy an International or a Professional? Not this 16 year old. I contented myself with a UE-8 which as I recall cost me $129.
Peter Kohler Washington DC USA
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