messrs. hovey and patrick,
allow me to suggest a possible compromise: instead of "correct restoration," we could use the phrase "ideal restoration." of course the meaning of ideal will not be universal. some people, like charles nighbor, will not want anything pantographed or colored in. but for the majority of people who undertake a restoration of, say, an early masi, i believe their ideal build would include the stamped bar, the ttt saddle with the m foil, etc. - in other words, by not using the term "correct," we will not raise the implication that restorations without these cool parts are somehow incorrect. i know bob did intend to raise that implication, but as dave pointed out, it irks some people.
as the owner of a 74 italian masi, i would love to have all those cool panto components, but alas, they are rare and expensive. so i have built my bike with standard but period correct components. my build is not incorrect, but it is not my ideal either.
on a side note, charles nighbor's comments about pantographing ruining the aesthetic quality of components (and colored pantographing being even more ofensive to him), made me think about the different pantographing style of various marques. i find the masi style to be very subtle as applied to the chainring, post and shifters - the stem is the only component where the panto'ing resembles the more common style of big and bold letters and symbols. colnago is the brand that in my mind exemplifies this "big" style of panto'ing, while cinelli represents the most subtle and discrete panto'ing i have ever seen, at least in their application to chainrings, seatposts and calipers. i think masi lies somewhere in the middle between the styles exemplified by cinelli and colnago, each being at opposite ends of the style spectrum.
in that respect, i think the masi panto bits are made more desirable by having their own, fairly unique, style.
thanks for reading,
ray dobbins miami florida
BobHoveyGa@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 12/12/05 12:13:28 PM, patrick-ajdb@sbcglobal.net writes:
>
> So Bob, is it your contention that proper twin-plate Masi restoration
> requires engraved Masi 3t bars? I guess that's were this started off, s
o what's
> your take?
>
>
>
>
>
> Dave Patrick
>
> Chelsea, Michigan
>
>
Well, as I said, I was probably a bit hasty in my use of the words "proper restoration" which one could construe to define the one and only way. I re ally didn't mean that, perhaps a better term would have been "complete factory restoration" or perhaps "reconstruction of a complete bike as produced by th e Vigorelli shop."
Since no production records seem to have survived, I guess we'll never know what percentage of Alberto's 74 bikes were complete or frameset only. My o wn opinion is based on shop photos from the period or close to the period, as well as nearly complete unrestored examples that have surfaced, some of whic h have made their way over to the US. A particularly fine example is here:
http://www.theracingbicycle.com/
Another is at Speedbicycles.com (the site is built with frames so you'll hav e to navigate to it manually.. it's in the Museum section).
In both cases, you can see that Alberto lavished a significant amount of car e on these bikes... in addition to the special components, you can see the dab s of yellow paint that have been applied to cable ends and the bolt ends of th e brakes and cable clamps. Several other bikes like this have surfaced so I
think it would be safe to assume that this is not a "bike show" configuratio n.
As for a person who is embarking on a restoration, beginning with a frameset
or complete bike with a mishmash of components that postdate the frame, I believe that his benchmark is most often the complete bike as produced by th e manufacturer, using components that the builder selected. It was in this l ight that I made my original statement... that the bike in question might be a go od buy as a restoration project since it had a set of these increasingly hard t o find bars that Alberto equipped the complete bikes with. I did not mean to imply that there is anything at all wrong with a 1974 Italian GC that does N OT have these bars... it could very well have been built up that way from a bar e frame by an original owner and there's absolutely nothing wrong with keeping it that way, or in emulating such a build in a later restoration.
Bob Hovey
Columbus GA