I want to rattle on about some vintage machines, some of which are off topic, but may help put the search for excellence in bike frames in perspective. First, saxophones. The nation that gave the world Herse & Singer, Peugeot and Simplex, also produced what many believe are the finest saxophones ever made: the Selmer (Paris) Balanced Action, Super B.A. and the legendary Mk VI. On saxophone websites you will find endless discussions of which serial numbers are the "great" horns and why (a popular theory is that the early horns were made of brass from spent artillery shell casings), what you should do to modify them to compensate for design flaws, whether relacquering a worn sax is a mortal sin, or only venial, though there is general agreement that relacquering damages the tone. Sound familiar? Charlie Parker, one of the giants of jazz sax, had a drug problem. He often played on borrowed horns because he would pawn his own to buy heroin. He sometimes used an English Grafton plastic sax, (the Viscount "Death Fork" of saxophones). I defy anybody to tell what he's playing on any given recording: he sounded about the same on all of them, which is to say worlds better than most of his contemporaries.
Michael Shiffer
EuroMeccanica, Inc.
114 Pearl Street
Mount Vernon, NY 10550
(914) 668-1300
euromeccanicany.com