as many of you know, i have another hobby, which is bike photography (www.raydobbins.com). although i was an avid amateur photographer once during my teens, today my interest in photography is limited exclusively to photographing my bicycles.
this came as a direct result of having to take photos for ebay listings. i kept trying to take better and better photos originally because it would help sell my bike for a better price. eventually, i realized that the photos also served another purpose, just as important if not more so, especially long-term: preservation of the memories of a bike i once owned.
even after i've sold them, i can look at my photo albums and see my old bikes in their full glory, and in intimate detail as well. believe me, there is better way to remember a bike - memory simply can't compare!
i also take photos of bikes i still have (and don't plan to sell), because truth be told, it is easier to for me to appreciate these bikes from the photos than from the rafters - when you have about 10 bikes hung close together, taking one down to look at it...well, it just doesn't happen!
thanks to internet, i can also share all my bikes, old, curent and new, with a great number of friends and fellow enthusiasts. to me, that is one of the greatest ways to enjoy my bikes.
and last but not least, i have discovered that having a nice photo album of a bike i have sold, makes me feel like i still own a part of it. and if it was a bike that i "built," the photos are a great way of, to paraphrase tom dalton, appreciating my own effort, care and patience, for many years to come, without the memories dwindling.
i urge any of you interested in the bike-photo hobby to go for it! enjoyable and satisfying, it is a worthwhile complement to our main passion for bicycles. and it is well within the reach of any of us - check out the "my photo setup" link in the main page of my site to see how relatively simple it can be.
thanks for reading,
ray dobbins miami florida
Tom Dalton <tom_s_dalton@yahoo.com> wrote: 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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