Thursday, September 28, 2006

A new bike in the family

I recently stumbled on an early Merckx frame while perusing ebay. Not the earliest, but sort of a transitional frame between the first generation and second generation of Merckx frames. On a whim, I threw what I thought was a low bid on it, and won. It was in Belgium, so I expected to wait quite some time to receive it, but to my surprise, it arrived less than a week later.





Its an SL road frame. My guess is 84 or 85 -- I'll be mailing the folks at Gita, the importer of Merckx bikes in to the US to see if they can give me a date. No idea if they have a list of all bikes made, or if there's a serial scheme they haven't told anyone, but they might be able to give me more info. It has under-the-bottom-bracket gear cable routing -- so not early 80's, on top of the top tube brake routing, so not late 80s, and a single set of bottle bosses, which would be abnormal by the mid-to-late 80's.







Early-to-Mid 80's SL decal.







Early style side-slant lettering on the downtube







The modern EM logo caps on the seatstays.



All of which says to me, 84/85. I'll update when/if I hear from Gitabike.

3 comments:

MODERNA INTERIORS said...

hi i got a late 80s early 90 merckx numbers says P 3789

NO COSA DECALS CHROMED LUGS

105 cranch ,brack , head etc

any ideas anybody on this bike

let me know thanks Ben
ben@zuydwijk.nl

Unknown said...

Excellent Sharing! I love racing events. I am look forward to know about the upcoming and past racing events at Nelson Ledges Race Course in Garrettsville, ohio, United States.

Emerxil said...

Eddy Merckx Professional Columbus SL (late) built at the earliest in the summer of 1985, painting pattern frame team TeVeBlad 1985.

Related Posts with Thumbnails