At 5:43 PM -0800 1/25/08, Norris Lockley wrote:
>Some weeks ago in aburst of writer's enthusiasm I introduced this
>bike to members of the List...but never finished the second half of
>the story, about it's provenance.
>
>Any way..to get the show on the road again, so to speak, I have put
>a dozen or so photos of it, in a set, on my Flickr pages. The
>address is
>
> http://www.flickr.com/
>
>If you want a slightly quicker address you can find the photos along
>with some others of a MECACYCLE Turbo frame on:-
>
>www.flickr.com/photos/cyclecrank
>
>and then thumb through the phots and sets.
>
Comparing your photos to the Rebour drawings of 1951 Koblet's Tour de France-winning bike (reprinted in Bicycle Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 2), it becomes clear that the photos show a different bike, not the one Koblet rode in the Tour de France 1951.
While the general outline of the two bikes is similar, there are a number of discrepancies, such as: - Koblet's bike used long dropouts, the one in the photos has short ones. - Koblet's bike had a wrapover chainstay attachment at the seat tube (very similar to Singer/Herse, etc.), the one in the photos does not. - Koblet's bike had a seat lug that was cut away in a very minimalist way, unlike the bike in the photos.
It is unlikely that Rebour drew these incorrectly, or that they were modified at a later stage. The only logical conclusion is that the bike in the photos is not the one Koblet rode to victory in the 1951 Tour.
Sorry to debunk yet another famous bike... but there are many more fakes out there than real ones.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
140 Lakeside Ave #C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.bikequarterly.com