Okay, so earlier this season a pal of mine and I got a deal on a pair of Luiginos. He'll stay unnamed. We learned that Gita had a few non-custom bikes in the blue color that you see on the ByKyle site. We got them from another dealer who is a nice guy and wanted to sell some bikes...My bike, which is sitting here in the living room, looks exactly like those on the ByKyle site. I think Gita had three and we bought two of them. I could be wrong about that.
I had no illusions that this bike was all old school and classic. I asked Richie about awhile ago and he said what he said to everyone here. In addition to the features that Richie has noted as the primary bits of homage to the past, I would only add the Campagnolo 1010B dropouts (which he pointed out to me).
There are a few things to say about the frame that may be of interest to the Classicists but I took the bike to be a pretty nice example of a _modern_ lugged steel bike built with a few details to remind us of things of yore. What's wrong with that? So, because I took it to be actually a more modern bike I didn't put old parts on it. I thought about doing it all Super Record but this _isn't_ really an old bike, with its OS tubing and modern cast lugs, it's an homage of sorts with clear concessions to modernity, no? Mine has Campagnolo Record 9 speed Ergo and, like a Sachs or other great bikes built with classic considerations, this bike looks to my eye "appropriate" this way. I have old bikes that I love, I have new bikes with old stuff, so I did this one another way.
One really surprising feature of the frame is that it is unusually light. I mean, noticeably---its some sort of Dedaccai MCDlotsofnumbersletters tubing and I was expecting nothing like this. Built up it must be well under 20 pounds though I don't weigh bikes and don't really care, it's just an interesting side note. Pegoretti may have thought about this and built it this way, he likes light frames and I think he thought of this bike as everything a tig'd highzoot steel bike of his could do only with lugs and a nod to the past.
The sparse lugs are nice, clean looking, but don't seem to have undergone any special treatment. I mean, they don't look much worked over or filed. I bet they came out of the cast pretty clean to begin with. The paint has some grit and unfinished business about it, sort of typical Euro-paint in the way that they don't seem to care about this quite the way we do. Not even remotely close to a JB or Baylis, fergetaboutit. But I really love the color. It's easy on the eyes, looks nice (and shades differently) in all sorts of light, plus I am a sucker for anything close to french blues.
The threaded stem means I can get a great bar height without showing lots of stem. Oh, and the fork crown created a problem because it is some slightly larger diameter than true moderns. I had to use a bit of dremel tooling to get a regular Campagnolo headset to fit. It wouldn't seat properly. Now it's fine. Oh yes, and the rear dropouts are slightly off so that one screw has to be a millimeter ahead of the other to get the wheels to seat properly. But other than that, no problem. Cookie cutter bikes, gimmicks, whatever, I have to tell you that Pegoretti builds bikes that ride _fantastically_. It's not aesthetically perfect and nothing to compare to a Sachs, Baylis, Rivendell, or Mariposa, but it's pretty neat in its own way, not too common, and a _great_ ride. I have a set of the fancy Nitto bottle cages, a neat Regal saddle and a few touches that make it seem a bit more traditional (Mavic 451 brakes, the rest is Record). The cable guides on the bb shell are really handsome and the bike's geometries are neutral and forgiving. Anybody want to know anything about it?
It's no great shakes in comparison to Those That Shake Great but it's pretty neat to my eye.
Douglas Brooks
Canandaigua, NY