eh, its a trick question, innit?
personally, being the fan of original finish that i am, i came upon this question for myself a couple years back, when i had the opportunity to purchase a 1949 jack taylor tourist frame/fork - BUT - it wasnt original paint - BUT - it had been repainted by jack himself, before the works closed (and had a few small additions made).
i think, in the end (i bought the frame), i put frames resprayed/refinished/restored/modified by the original builder somewhere in between original paint and full restorations, and closer to the former than the latter. for me, jacks paint is as important a part of a jack taylor as normans brazing and kens final cleanup and build work - so paint redone by jack rather than original finish, whether it was needed or not, is only the merest of "faults" in my book...
so i say grey area! :)
-joel
At 10:13 -0700 06.02.2007, Jerome & Elizabeth Moos wrote:
>The short thread yesterday about expert restorations and how much
>respect they receive (or not) has suggested another thought to me.
>Is a bike refinished by the original builder a restoration or an
>original?
>
> I have an early 80's Matt Assenmacher refinised by Matt. Also a
>Richard Sachs refinished by Joe Bell who likely painted it in the
>first place. And Doug Fattic is currently offering for sale bikes
>he built for his inlaws which he plans to refinish before delivery.
>And I think Peter Weigle occasionally modifies and refinishes frames
>he built several yeras earlier.
>
> So are these originals or restorations? If the same hands finish
>it a second time, is it then again "original"?
>
> Antique furniture, like bikes, is much more valuable in original
>condition. But what if the original craftsman refinished the piece
>during his lifetime? Would this decrease the value? And how, 100
>years later, would anyone know it had been refinished?
>
> Or to site another analogy, some of the great masters were known
>to produce paintings over top of an earlier works of theirs with
>which they had presumably not been satisfied. Does this make the
>final piece not original, simply because there is another
>underneath? If DiVinci had painted the Mona Lisa on a recycled
>canvas, would it then be "nonoriginal"?
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Jerry Moos
> Big Spring, TX
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
--
joel metz : magpie@blackbirdsf.org : http://www.blackbirdsf.org/
bike messengers worldwide : ifbma : http://www.messengers.org/
magpie messenger collective http://www.magpiemessenger.com/
portland, oregon
==
i know what innocence looks like - and it wasn't there,
after she got that bicycle...