I am going to stick my neck out a little on this one & suggest that there was no one at Huffy who would have had any design input beyond color & size of HUFFY decal. The framebuilder / framebuiders of choice would have had complete control, in my opinion. I worked at Huffy for a short time & although there were some great individuals there, none were in a position to dictate or influence the kind of product that was being produced for these racing efforts. The knowledge base required did not exist @ Huffy. It was a marketing thing, period. If it were otherwise perhaps some of what was learned from these efforts would have found its way to production, but that was never the intent. The financial support was there, and for that credit is deserved. But those bikes were not Huffy's. Richard Rose, where it is finally hot & humid in Toledo, Ohio
-----Original Message----- From: classicrendezvous-admin@bikelist.org [mailto:classicrendezvous-admin@bikelist.org] On Behalf Of Moos, Jerry Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 9:04 AM To: 'Mark Poore'; Classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: RE: [CR]Confente on ebay, and a thought or two about same
I guess the only "requirement" I would set would be that someone at the company whose name appears on the bike had to devote some thought to the desired attributes of the bike, or the purpose for which it was to be used, and communicate this to the framebuilder.
I am assuming someone at Murray and at Huffy gave some serious thought to the bikes commissioned for LeMonde, for the 7-11 team, etc. I would think such bikes would be considerably more valuable with the original decals than with decals of the actual builder. These bikes did, after all, represent a commendable effort by at least some individuals at Huffy and Murray to build really high quality bikes, even if the effort was all too brief.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Poore [mailto:rauler47@hotmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 8:44 AM To: Classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: [CR]Confente on ebay, and a thought or two about same
Huffy? This is why I did say maybe, because I did know that their name did appear on some Olympic frames. The question is, Are they to really be considered Huffys? If Richard built frames for Murray, would they be considered Murrys or a Sach? Several years ago there was a fellow that came to our resort that worked for Huffy out of Ohio. He did have with him a Huffy, if you could call it that and he did, road bike. The frame was a beautiful piece of work. At this time I forget who built the frame, but I believe it was a well known American frame builder. The fellow was very proud of his Huffy. I saw it as a nice bike with Huffy decals.
The question I have at this time: would the Huffy decals decrease or increase or not effect the value of the bike? Any thought on this?
BTW, there was a Columbia bike on ebay just a while ago that went up for
auction twice that couldn't fetch a decent price although the frame was built by a respected frame builder. I actually bid on the bike, but held my bid rather low.
Could you imagine if Confente had built a few bikes under the Sears name?