Good Evening all. Has anyone considered repainting as a form of preservation or restoration. My first on topic bike is an early 1980's Marinoni, and when I bought the frame, the paint was in terrible condition. Living very close the the ocean, I was afraid that the salt air would rust the frame and ruin it. What to do.
I quickly decided that repainting the frame for it's own protection was the right course. When I'm asked, I tell people that the it's been repainted, and this I'm sour that lowered some of it's value, but preserved all it's other good qualities.
It's still have a very nice frame, and an excellent example of custom frame building from that era, safely kept under primer, paint, and frame saver. If the choice is between repainting the frame or losing it to the elements, than by all means the lesser evil is a new paint job.
Tom Harriman
San Francisco, Ca.
> Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:03:26 -0400
> From: ghollmd@gmail.com
> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Subject: [CR] Restoration-Honesty and Transparency
>
> It's most likely that the real issues in the restoration of vintage bikes
> are the honesty and transparency of the bike's owner.
> Originality is very hard to come by in a vintage bike and can't even be
> suitably defined. Even contemporary catalog images of vintage bikes are now
> found to have been retouched. I have been shown heavily and poorly restored
> vintage bikes by their original famous makers in their own shops and been
> told these bikes were original. Collectors here then told me that these
> great makers don't remember their own original work.
> Original means pristine. There are very few, if any, pristine vintage bikes
> around. Fake vintage bikes are always advertised as all original or 100%
> mint, etc.
> I think that what many collectors mean by original is based on their own
> concept of originality predicated on their experiences with the bike in
> question or with images of it, etc. This is very slippery ground since these
> concepts of originality are ideas and tend to change with time and place.
> Even the experts can't agree.
> Bike parts may be helpful in determining a vintage bike's age but they can
> be easily changed and makers sometimes sold frame sets or full bikes with a
> mixture of parts from different periods. Many parts can't be correctly dated
> either.
> As far as restoration goes, it's either well done or not. This becomes
> highly subjective-if it's pleasing to the owner or expert it's called
> conservation, sympathetic restoration, etc. Someone selling a bike has
> almost always conserved it.
> Sooner or later, almost every object created by man needs to be restored. No
> one can be against restoring part of an object unless the failure to to do
> so endangers the whole. However, even this a subjective decision and varies
> depending on the culture, time, place, etc. Furthermore, although sometimes
> the " don't fix it 'till it's broke" concept is a good one, however, if one
> waits too long to restore a bike, eventually it can't be restored at all.
> In sum and in short, the time comes to most all surviving vintage bikes to
> be restored.
> All the vintage bike collector can hope it that the restoration is well done
> and the bike's owner is honest and transparent about it.
>
> --
> George
>
> George Hollenberg MD
> CT, USA