And now, for something completely different....
In my opinion, the annual Madison Swap continues to be the best one in the Midwest for vintage lightweight parts. I may be a tad subjective in that, though, as I am a UW-Madison graduate, and still have friends there that I hang with while in town. It's a three-day trip for me (I drive there - about 800 miles round-trip), but it is absolutely worth the effort.
Last Saturday was no exception. Tom, several folks asked if you were there. John Barron and I shared six tables in a row, and we were generally so busy that there wasn't a lot of "walkabout time," but there were many CR list members there. Richard Cielec, Peter Naiman, Peter Jourdain, and I'm sure lots more that I'm forgetting to mention. A lot of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois folks, naturally.....
I think I saw several of the same customers that were at the first-ever Chicago VeloSwap last October (that one should be excellent next year, IMO, as #1 was quite good for a first event). Madison's temperatures were a bit, uh, brisk, at about -8 degrees F during setup, with a windchill of, oh, perhaps -30 or so, but once they opened up to the heat-generating public at 9:30 a.m., it warmed right up inside the venue.
John scooped up a beautiful low-mileage 1967ish chrome Paramount with 151 cranks, etc. Later, we were approached by a "vintage" racer with his battle-scarred early '70s Colnago that he was looking to sell. Scott McCollum was there with a nicely repainted Frejus for sale, as well as some NOS NR/SR-era parts. Peter Naiman had a table or two, and reported selling a lot of his stuff.
Seven hours went by very quickly, and then things got pretty quiet at about 3 p.m., so we packed up and went home to plan the evening's festivities. We ended up at the Great Dane microbrewery for dinner with still more friends, and then played some "vintage" Midwestern cards (Euchre) for the rest of the evening. All in all, a most excellent adventure.
Greg "numen lumen" Parker Dexter, Michigan (about a 6.5 hour drive from Madison)
P.S. In all of the dozens of swaps I've been to as a seller, I've only once had any significant item disappear. It was an NOS NR rear derailleur. Other than that, zip. Nada, rien, zilch, bupkis. I find about 99.8% of bike folks to be 100% honest. I even take personal checks at swaps, with zero problems so far.
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:35:53 -0600 From: "Koepke, Mark" <mkoepke@uwsp.edu> To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org> Subject: [CR]RE: Madison Wisconsin Swap -- Not so good...
Hi All: Yes, I was at the swap and would give it a "C-Rating." Actually, I spent a grand total of $10 on a set of gen-1 Chorus brakes... good deal... but bought nothing else at all. Stuff of vintage worth was either too expensive or just not there. I ran into some other collectors who said that they just didn't bother to bring their stuff because E-Bay makes the market better. There is also the fear of things simply "walking-away" from the table. Yes, that has happened to me too. Anyway, I did manage to get rid of a couple of hundred $s worth of junk..not vintage...so I ate well that evening. Madison is full of super restaurants. Also, I went Sunday to the capitol square and watched the XC ski races -- they'd trucked in tons of snow and covered the streets. Awesome. Ciao, Mark ..```Stevens Point, WI