At 08:20 AM 09/10/2008 -0700, Jan Heine wrote:
>I agree with Alex that an original bike should be worth more than the
>sum of its parts. When you buy an original Herse, you pay for the
>parts, and get the frame as a gift.
That's difficult to understand. If you were to build a bike from its component parts, the total cost would be many times the price of the complete bike. That usually applies to anything, cars computers, whatever. I would think building a classic vintage bike from components is similar, and you end up with something not "numbers matching", as they say in the car world. Sure, in the case of vintage bikes, an original complete bike OUGHT to be more valuable than a collection of parts, but who would have the cash to buy it, as Mike Kone said?
Then there's the mystique of hunting down the parts and building the bike. That in itself is what many of us enjoy the most because it's our hobby. It can actually be an anti-climax once the bike is complete. We've had our fun putting everything together and the total cost was worth the experience and it was $100 here, $50 there and we certainly could not have bought all the bits at once, even if they had been available. Once the project is done nobody would buy it from us for the total cost, but we'd let it go for a fraction because we've had our money's worth putting it all together and now we want to move on to something else.
John Betmanis
Woodstock, Ontario
Canada