Monday, January 21, 2008

Finite space + wife = time for a little purge

Living in NYC means finite space. Cohabitating in 900 or so square feet with a wife, an oversized cat and more than a handful of bikes means we spend a lot of time getting in each others way. Which means that if I want to continue getting cool bike stuff, I have to purge things every once in a while.


I'd make some quip about it being part of the cycle of life, but I avoid bad puns as much as possible. The real punchline here is, sometimes you have to get rid of some things in order to get others.

Since I have a whole lot of spares and duplicates in the collection, I figured I'd put some of it on eBay. Little bit of Campy, some Mavic, and Shimano thrown in for good measure. Check out my listings!

I'll be listing more, so keep checking in -- maybe that hard to find part will show up!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Mavic 870 Triple Front Derailleur

Mavic offered more or less the same front derailleur from the late seventies until they got out of the component game in the 90's. It went from a plain aluminum colored version (810) to the anodized, "SSC" version (860), and was sold as a clamp on (810/860), French style braze-on (811/861) and Italian braze-on (812/862). The 860 and 862 are pretty frequently seen, the 810/812 a little less so. The French braze-on is less common, but very rarely used, and so there's little demand there.



Mavic also offered a very hard to find triple derailleur, starting sometime in the mid-80's. Designated the 830 (non-anodized) and the 870 (anodized SSC), it was the same as the 810/860, with a longer cage.



I was lucky enough to stumble on a trio of Mavic 870 derailleurs recently, which I got for an eminently fair price.



And because they're so easily broken down + reassembled, if one needed a braze-on triple (872), and all they had was a clamp on (870), they could just swap out the body from a double (862). Too cool!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

An interesting Merckx on eBay

One of the primary methods I've employed to decipher the Merckx serial number scheme is by setting up a search on eBay that mails me a listing of every new bike or frame on a daily basis. I've seen some great examples -- former team frames, NOS frames that have been sitting in a Belgian basement since they were built, new color schemes I hadn't seen before...all sorts of cool things.

Today I saw a listing for a frame in Motorola livery that I thought I'd share. Not because its some pedigreed frame, or particularly obscure, but because its being sold to benefit a fellow rider who was involved in a pretty terrible accident involving a drunk driver.

Seeing as how I get a ridiculous number of hits from people looking for Merckx info, I decided I'd post a link to the listing.

It actually is an interesting frame. Take note of the decals on it -- this isn't the standard Motorola decal package, but an earlier one that would typically be used for a solid, paneled or fade color scheme. Pointed liveries would typically have a different set of seat tube graphics, and those slanted letters -- well, I thought those were gone by the late 80's.

I've seen four or five of these Motorola frames with the odd decals. A couple of Corsa's, a Strada, and maybe a Corsa Extra as well, all in the C date code (1990/1991). My guess is they're early Motorola color scheme frames, prior to them nailing down the decal package. Or are they something else? No good answers here, but I think they're an interesting variant on a pretty popular color scheme.

Maybe one of you out there who's been looking for a Merckx of their own will find it there -- and help a rider in need at the same time.

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