At 3:45 PM +0000 10/5/08, alex m wrote:
>eBay item 370093623287
>
>I learnt a lot from the Colnago appeal, so am trying my luck with a Cinelli
>. Are the experts the same for both marques?
>
>Alexander March
>Bordeaux
>France
It's a beautiful bike.
The Cinelli registry indicates a few early 1960s bikes with numbers between 5300 and 5600 - yours is 5514, so it would fit in there.
However, yours has "ears" in the lugs, and those seem to have been deleted around 1960. So your late 1950s estimation seems likely. If the saddle is original, it would date from after 1957.
Is it possible that Cinelli built frames for stock, but only stamped them with numbers once they were sold? So a late 1950s frame might have been sold only in 1960, received it number and then was chrome-plated? (When I bought my Marinoni in 1990, it was a stock frame that was then painted to my specs.)
Chrome may be original, I have seen a few chrome-plated 1950s Italian bikes.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
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Seattle WA 98122
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