You've evidently missed my point. I'm not suggesting that it is inappropriate to discuss the relative merits Rembrandt and Pollock, but rather that likening a child's finger painting to Pollock is not appropriate, yet can and does result from a lack of understanding. The two works may look the same to the uninformed, but they are not. You said yourself that "the opinions of all equally informed persons have equal merit." This may be true, but if it is, so is the converse, which is that the opinons of those less informed have less merit. Anyone who understands the process of framebuilding will not look at a PY-10 and consider it to be the result of serious effort by a skilled craftsman. They will see it for what it is, a rather hastily assembled, though functional, productioin racing bike. Perhaps the guys who were building them were some of the most skillfull users of file and torch to ever grace the craft, but the bikes are not expressions of this skill.
Maybe this is just a semantic argument. It seems that you are lumping a whole lot of things under the heading of craftsmanship, including basic design and other attributes that contribute to function and utility. This would explain your insistance that one has to ride a bike to evaluate what you are calling craftsmanship. To be certain, one really needs to ride a bike to fully appreciate its performance. In fact, one really must ride a racing bike harder and better than most of us are capable of to evaluate its instanteous and long-term suitability for its intended purpose. This may be why some of us defer to the opinion of Merckx rather than you, suspect as Merckxs motivations might be. In any case, I believe a well-informed person can tell a lot about how a bike will ride based on inspection and specifications. How else do you buy frames without first riding them, as we usually do? But I digress, because what Im getting at is that one need not ride a bike to evaluate its craftsmanship if you take craftmanship to be the expression of the efforts of a craftsman, or skilled artisan. With craftsmanship defined this way, Websters way, things like eveness and penetration of brazing, uniformity of lug shorelines, lug taper and thickness, eveness and gloss of paint are indeed objective criteria for evaluating craftsmanship. All this matters little toward performance or utility, but it is stuff that requires both posession of skills and the application of those skills, one or both of which were not present when the PY-10s were built.
Evaluations of craftmanship are not entirely subjective, no matter how much you may want to believe that they are. It is not a completely random circumstance that folks pay a lot more for some bikes than others, though craftsmanship is only one thing that contributes to the merits of a bike, and it must be seen in context. It is naïve to expect a PY-10 to be as well crafted as a Baylis, since almost no bikes at that time were toiled over like a Baylis is today, and certainly not a moderately priced production racing bike. I might pay a pretty steep price for a Peugeot like Thevenets. Quite irrationally I might pay even more for one like Phil Anderson rode. But I wouldnt kid myself that they are well crafted, no matter how cool they would be to own, and possibly to ride.
Tom Dalton Bethlehem, PA Jerome & Elizabeth Moos <jerrymoos@sbcglobal.net> wrote: The measure of what constitutes fine craftsmanship most certainly is subjective. I can't think of many things more subjective. Many devotees of Rembrant or Raphael no doubt consider Pollock crap. Is that subjective? Damn right it is. So whose opinion is "correct"? That of the most famous person? The richest? The most powerful? I would say that the opinions of all equally informed persons have equal merit. So, as I mentioned before, if Chuck Schmidt, and Dirk and I all own and ride both a PY-10 and a Raleigh Pro, and if some of us think the Raleigh is great and the Peugeot is crap, or vice versa or that both are equally great, all those opinions have equal merit, being equally informed. But if Chairman Bill has never ridden a PY-10 or any of its components, then his opinion is uninformed, and combined with the obvious bias of his selling a lot of Italian stuff and virtually no French stuff, his opinion is nothing but BS.
While a Peugeot obviously does not have the level of finish of a Sachs or Baylis or Weigle, neither do the great French constructeur bikes, Herse included. Does this mean the Herse is not as "fine"? That's totally subjective. It depends what you mean by craftsmanship. If it means flawless lug finishing and deep lustrous, perfectly even paint, then the average Herse or Singer is crap compared to the current top US builders. But if it means ingenious, exquisite, design details like integrated wiring for lights and cable routing integrated into custom-made stems, then I think even the current gods of US framebuilding I mentioned would consider the French constructeur bike as "fine" as anything ever made. French craftmanship, at least in bicycles, is about design and concept and "rightness" for the task, and the visual effect as a whole, not about flawless finish and detailing. Both approaches fit within the extremely subjective definition of craftsmanship.
Regards,
Jerry Moos Houston, TX
Tom Dalton <tom_s_dalton@yahoo.com> wrote: Jerry wrote: "Nothing wrong with healthy disagreements, I just wish people would base their opinions on actual experience, as you do."
I too base my opinions on experience. I've never ridden a PY-10 or a PX-10 or any of the higher-end Peugots. I have, however, had the experience of looking at many such Peugeots, and that experience has been more than enough for me to form the opinion that they are not well crafted. Race worthy? I certainly see no reason whay they wouldn't be, since they have been used to win the biggest race of them all. Cool bikes? Well, any pro team bike, when equipped as used by the team, is pretty cool in my book. Good examples of the craft? OBVIOUSLY NOT. A bike doesn't need to be a good example of the craft in order to be a good race bike, or in order to be a cool addition to one's collection. In fact, I don't own a single bike that I consider to be an exceptional example of the craft, and most team bikes are not. But please, please, please, let's not kid ourselves about PY-10's being as fine as Team Pros, or about Team Pros being as fine as Confentes. There are objective criteria for evaluating the craftsmanship of frames as surely as there are subjective criteria. To suggest that a PY-10 exhibits the objective traits of a well-crafted frame is absurd. To say that it meets one's personal criteria for fine craftmanship, as though these things are all subjective and all opinions have equal merit, is utter nonsense. This is the type of thinking that leads to ignorant opinions such the belief that a grandchild's finger painting has the same merit as a Pollock.
Tom Dalton Bethlehem, PA
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
---------------------------------
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page