All the buzz about PX-10 dating (as opposed to more casual relationships?) prompted me to dig through the stuff I found when rebuilding mine. Much of the archive is the same as what's been discussed most recently, like the Dutch website with old catalog pages & specs. My frame is (ostensibly) a 1972 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/18565374@N03/sets/72157622227065854/), and looks like the PX-10 on the peugeotshow.nl site for the '72 time frame. Chrome lower forks & chain-stays, black head tube lugs, not Nervex (simpler, rounded form), etc.
I echo the comments of others that photos should be considered only approximate helps - The catalog pages in many places clearly demonstrate this with the re-use of that Eddy Merkcx shot in multiple years. Drawings also got re-used, even when the listed specs changed.
My issue was relatively simplified in that it was not a complete bike. I got the frame, and then collected parts based on a reasonable composite of contemporary parts listed on spec sheets. It's a rider, not a museum wall hanging, so knowing how one might upgrade or change a build in a shop provides some leeway - my bars are Philippe Franco-Italia, not TdF, for example. That said, I do have Mafac Competition brakes as specified for the higher end build rather than the easier to find Racers.
I think one - we collectors - can get more wrapped up in this when it IS a complete bike and one is trying to track the provenance. French build for French market? Exported? All parts look as though they could be original issue, so is that the way such bike were "supposed" to be built? Was there enough of a "standard build" to qualify as a "supposed to be" condition, or did markets change so much from across Europe to the UK to North America that each was different? Any of those differences identifiably common? (like some sub-races of birds - it a warbler of such-and-such species but this one is from Maine and that one from Maryland ...). We've written here before about Louis Malle's wonderful OT short, Vive le Touy (1962), but for those of you who have it - or want it - look also at another film oftne in that Malle set (http://www.criterion.com/films/670-vive-le-tour). It's "Humain, trop Humain" and it is a fascinating character and culture study of the Peugeot auto assembly plant of a little later (1973), and the period about which were talking. It's easy to see how variations would show up if there were different parts in some of the bins.
After that, and the old Albert Finney film about a Raleigh factory (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), it's more a wonder these bikes had any parts in common at all!
As for mine, whose provenance is less certain than any muttley whelp from the SPCA shelter, my simple response to the "What is that?" question is:
"French ... and Old."
a bientot -
Bob Hillery
dodgey rider dodging thunderstorms
Stratham, New Hampshire, USA