DISCLAIMER: I haven't ever entered a bike in a judging contest, but unfortunately for the CR community [ :-) ] I have an opinion about just about everything ... so i'll chime in anyway ...
- there are different types of people in this world. some like to ride their bikes hard. some like to keep their bikes pristine and won't ride in a light shower outside. some others enjoy taking a sow's ear and trying to convert it into a silk purse.
- in my opinion, bike shows should encourage both conservatorship and usage of vintage bikes. Conservatorship of the _art_ is more important than conservatorship of a particular instance of a bike.
- how hard is it to snag a NOS frame from some remote shop in the midwest, and then find a garage-queen bike on ebay, and move the parts over ?? IMHO, as of 2008, its still very easy to do this for a 1970's bike, like a MASI. It seems much harder to do for a 1960's bike, and well-night impossible for a 1950's bike.
- how hard is it to do an accurate repaint ?? For MASI's and Paramounts, it's a no-brainer as the original makers are still performing frame repairs and repaints, in some cases with (i think) original decals (paramounts.) If you have a scrap of paramount or MASI metal, and enough $$$, YOU CANT FAIL TO GET IT RESTORED.
For Colnagos, the decal support is very good, but pantographica esoterica makes restoration very, very difficult.
For some other mass-production models like Raleigh and Motobecane and even Peugeot, decal support is much worse, and decal accuracy is not high. We need to encourage better decal accuracy on these models.
I made 7x decals recently for 3 bikes I'm restoring. 3 of them were unavailable, but 4 of the after-market replacements were CRAP.
A good bike show should hasten the death for BAD replacement decals.
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In my opinion, a bike show should encourage people to restore bikes "when the time comes".
If the owner of a restored bike brings a photograph of the bike before restoration, and the judges deem it "worthy of restoration", then it should be considered no less worthy than an original. If the decals are not accurate, they should be marked down, as if they had been scuffed, not by the bike owner, but by the decal-maker's hands.
If the decals are very very close, and the bike is nicer than an original, the repaint should win. After all, it's more of a veteran than the bike with garage-queen origins.
- Don ("Flamesuit On!") Gillies
San Diego, CA