I put some photos of my fake Faema bike on Wooljersey at the link below:
(http://www.wooljersey.com/gallery/stockweb/RIDE-PHOTOS/Faema-fake/)
I went with the Faema motif because white is an easy color to obtain in spr ay cans, and the simple insignia can be cut from reflective "safety tape" w ith an X-acto knife.
The folder also contains some photos of a Merckx Faema bike (the photo is d escribed as being from the '69 Milan-San Remo in the first volume of Fabulo us World of Cycling, but it is still in the era when Merckx yet suffered th e ignominy of riding a bike without his own name on it.
I also added my other source material: grainy photos of a Faema bike th at someone posted to CR a few years ago. I had printed them out in black and white but no longer have the link -- anybody know what site these came from?
The goal was to cobble up a commuter bike out of "left over" parts. T he frame is a 2nd-tier Italvega (stamped dropouts, no derailleur hanger, 27 -inch wheels) that was discarded by a neighbor during Spring Cleanup Day circa 2001.
Since I was merely conjuring an image rather than recreating total accu racy, I was comfortable replacing the seattube decoration on the origin al bike with some of the Italvaga's chrome, and I also stuck with the chrome "socks" on the stays and forks. The shape of the stay caps an d chromed crown vaguely support the plausibility of the Faema paint, and wi th 700c wheels there is plenty of room for fenders. I needed quite a lon g reach on the brakes, so I used some old steel sidepulls I had pirated o ff someone else's discard -- a Raleigh "Sprite".
It is a tribute to my shallowness that even though this bike weighs a ton a nd steers like a battle ship, I've been riding it almost exlusively for t he last year. Once while switching off the lead in a paceline, a fellow cyclist laughed and said "I guess the bike doesn't really make that much di fference." I don't remember what I replied, but I should have answered " no, but the paint does."
Brad Stockwell
Palo Alto CA USA