George H. wrote, in part, with regard to ebay # 300343941251
The expense of doing this correctly would be over $3000, perhaps much, much more. In the end, you have a pricey replica (or whatever name one likes)-with an overall investment of more than $4000-nearly the price of a similar unrestored bike. As you know, the current sentiment among some American collectors doesn't favor this sort of restoration-in fact they hold such restored bikes in contempt. In short, I agree that there are great classic bikes out there, but I can't tell whether this was one of them. Regards,
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George and I differ on this. A simple analysis clears up any confusion. This bike really was a great deal, whether you restored it or not, but let's say you did.
You buy the bike for $800 including shipping. Strip it. Take it to your favorite painter (or ship to Joe Bell or CyclArt, or whoever, according to your ste). Paint, remove braze-ons, chromed fork crown and front drops (chrome is not required, btw, some of these frames came without any chrome at all, although most of them had chromed crowns, that I've seen), proper graphics--now easily available as far as I'm aware--will cost between 600 and 900 bucks. Add to the 800 bucks you paid for the bike. Salvage any parts that are correct for the period--brakes, pedals, cranks, and brake levers, hubs and skewers, bars and stem (note cool nutted cinelli stem) and seatpost were all period correct, far as I could tell. Might even have been original. You need proper racing sew-up wheels, unicanitor saddle, Nuovo record derailleurs, Regina corsa chain.
Mike Kone is still selling some nice period spokes that would be perfect for a high-flange wheel-set if you wanted to build new. Period rims are plentiful, esp,. period Nisis, which commonly came on these.
Superleggere pedals would have been a plausible period upgrade within a year of the original sale, so those are keepers..sell or keep the other parts as they're nice enough, heck, the wheels and derailleurs alone would go for over 300 bucks easy if you don't want to use them for something else. Proper dt shifters are easy to find if the ones on it aren't original.
You can do your own math, but mine says that with a little time, effort, and patience, you can get this bike perfectly restored down to the last detail for around 2K, all-in, ready-to-ride, maybe even less, but certainly not much more if you're careful. A little more if you like expensive tires! Even if it came to 2500 all up, still a bargain, but no way it should cost you any more than that.
Some of this depends on how picky you are. Some of these early 70s bikes had upgrades like fluted seatposts and stems, but these were not common. As another poster pointed out, the pantografata stuff was not sold on these early colnagos, and, truth is, many of these were sold as frame/fork only, and built to taste by the local shop.
As for the "contempt" in which "some" collectors hold restored bikes..well, it's not restoration that's problematic, it's the style of the restoration, about which I'll say no more..we all have our own taste in the matter, but I could see buying that bike, and taking the frame to Joe Bell, and discussing with him in some detail exactly how I wanted it done, and I would have ended up with a bike that you couldn't tell from original 6 feet away. Get closer and you'd probably find the decals put on a bit too precisely, as Joe is very picky about that, and I don't have a problem with that. <g> Other than that, it might take awhile to figure out that it was repainted, or so would be my goal.
Maybe I could have gotten Joe to paint the fill a bit sloppy...but probably not, he's very picky about that too. But the paint itself we'd do it so that you would have to really look carefully to determine if it was original, or a repaint.
At any rate, it would be a very enjoyable period rider without a too-rich financial investment..and, I can assure you, if a bike like the one I would make out of that one came on the market, totally original, it'd easily sell for nearly twice what I would have had in the restored bike, so, to me, that's a good deal.
Really makes me wish that bike had been my size...I'd have done it up Molteni Orange. It would have been fun.
Charles Andrews Los Angeles
"everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time."
--Joseph Schumpeter, via Simon Johnson