[CR]I want to cry

(Example: Framebuilders:Chris Pauley)

Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 06:55:55 -0800 (PST)
From: "Tom Dalton" <tom_s_dalton@yahoo.com>
To: chuckdds@aol.com
cc: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Subject: [CR]I want to cry

Snipped from Chuck Schlesinger's post:

Anyway, I am over it. I know he will make a lot of money by parting it up- way more than he paid for it! So all of you out there looking for NOS Super Record stuff- it's there on EBAY now. If it is pristine in in is whole- let it survive as that!

Chuck, It's sad to realize that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, one's patience and effort to assemble all the "right" parts for a bike is rewarded with that assemblage being worth less than the sum of the individual parts. All the bikes in my collection are pieced together so carefully that they would likely have been less period correct had they been assembled near the time of their frames' manufacture. Contrary to what some have opined here, how a bike is assembled isn't all just a matter of taste. Most bikes pieced-together from vintage parts fall far short of represeting a single narrow timeframe. But, to appreciate this you need to know a fair amount about the equipment, and many collectors do not. Thus, even studied efforts beyond the assertion your subjective tastes are not rewarded. Of course, even if everyone cared about and was knowlegable of period correctness, the market would continue to reward parting bikes due an increased demand for specific date-correct parts.

In the end, was your bike really "pristine and in its whole" as you said, or was it pieced together about 20 years after the fact? Clearly it's a matter of perspective. While your piecing may have been done with great care, the bike in no way serves as a snapshot of exactly what an NOS Alan SR looked like at some specific date, it's your interpretation. While you may lament that your buyer undid your efforts, others probably lament that you took those NOS parts out of their boxes and hung them on the bike in the first place. Contrary to what you wrote above, the parts now hitting Ebay are "take-off" and not NOS. Because of this you might have lost money even if you'd parted the bike, you just lost more by keeping it whole. Add to this that your time and effort was in no way rewarded. Ouch! It sure must sound like I'm rubbing salt in your wounds, but my point is that you need to take solace in the fact that you did a good job building that bike. I assume that this is a hobby for you and the enjoyment of the process is it's own reward. Nobody is going to appreciate your level of patience and effort as much as you do, so just focus on appreciating it yourself even after the product is gone. Maybe watching your bike get torn apart is suffering for your art.

Tom Dalton Bethlehem PA

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