Just been reading up on this old topic of a bike being worth more than the sum of it's components. Logic to a point, that's how you need to sell an un roadworthy car if you have the savvy, in replacment parts. Much more bread. It's how scrapyards make money from cars too.
But in the bike world, the ratio on a good Herse is about five to one. So y ou can buy a complete Herse for 3000-4000 bucks, have it shipped, break it up and make some very serious money if you know about Herses, which parts f rom which years are sought after. You could even finance your Herse that wa y. Just sell the ultra expensive and replace with perfectly good but non-hy steria generating Herse parts.
Anyway, the Japanese are no longer dictating the the prices on Herse, the F rench are. They have suddenly, thanks to ebay, cottoned on to the fact that Herse is prestigious and worth a fortune, therefore must be the ultimate. The record prices for pretty grotty Herses on French ebay lately have been the work of French buyers. So far the sellers haven't cottoned onto this, b ut they will eventually.
So Herse owners, start shipping them back here, this is where the bread is, they are screaming for them.
Nick March, Agen, 47000 Lot et Garonne, France
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