>You may want to pad the
>bottom of the cage and the undersides of the clamps with electrical tape
>or innertube strips before your tighten things down onto your authentic
>and brittle frame paint.
Don't use inner tube strips on old bikes as cushioning. The polymers or whatever in the rubber bleed into the paint. On the 1952 Rene Herse I used for a 300 km brevet last year, I attached a battery-powered rear light (the original lighting does not work) with a piece of inner tube between clamp and frame. When it was time to return the bike a few weeks later, the paint had discolored. A little polish took care of that, but I wonder what would have happened after a few years.
For cushioning, I use cloth handlebar tape. It's adhesive and easy to cut into strips of the right width.
As far as classic cages go, the classic TA steel cage came out around 1957 (shown in Le Cycliste 3/1957). So it's appropriate for most of our bikes. And relatively easy to find. (I don't know whether the logo changed or something, but to my untrained eye, they all look similar.) The single-clamp and bar-mount versions (without plastic top) actually came out later.
There were a multitude of other cages out there, and in France, many constructeurs even made their own, to go on braze-ons when cages all were designed for clamp-on mounting.
Was the TA the first cage to allow both clamp-on and braze-on mounting? (The spacing is exactly the same as on Herse cages from 1948 onward ...)
Jan Heine
Editor/Publisher
Vintage Bicycle Quarterly
c/o Il Vecchio Bicycles
140 Lakeside Ave, Ste. C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com