Down Into The Memory Hole – Bike Snob NYC

I was reading Dave Moulton’s blog recently, which in turn brought me to this Bicycling review from 1989 of one of his Fuso Lux bicycles:

that’s a hell of a nice looking bike. I wonder if today it looks as haggard as the Faggin:

Anyway, the review was by John Kukoda, who also wrote a contemporary review of the Vengeance Bike:

And trashed the moustache bar on the X0-1:

Reading modern bike reviews makes you stupid, but reading old bike reviews is edifying because it gives you a new perspective on the present. (And yes, reading today’s stupid bike reviews will be similarly edifying in 35 years.) In one way things have changed a lot (the frame materials, the gear changing systems), but in another way they haven’t at all (pseudoscience seasoned with clever turns-of-phrase). And of course it’s fun to see what stuff cost, as was the case here:

There’s a commonly-held notion that bike stuff has never been as expensive as it is now–a notion I’ve already more or less debunked using pseudoscience and clever turns-of-phrase. The above is further evidence of this, as according to an Internet inflation calculator that Fuso Lux frame today would cost about $3,500, which is pretty much in line with a high-end frame and fork today. I mean yes, if you want a bike from a living legend like Richard Sachs it costs like $30,000 and you’ll have to wait for at least 50 years, but I’m fairly sure $3,500 is what the modern-day equivalent of the potential Fuso customer of yesteryear would be spending on a “frameset” today.

And what about that Campagnolo seven-speed alloy freewheel, which cost a whopping THREE HUNDRED AND TEN American Freedom Tickets back in 1989? Holy shit, that would be like $775 today! That’s even more than SRAM’s XX XY AXPLS EAGLE GRVL ASPLD whatever-it’s-called, which goes for like $600:

I was dumbfounded when SRAM discovered they could market a cassette that expensive, so the fact that Campy had them beat way back in the last century was humbling–though I suppose a freewheel is a more sophisticated component than a cassette in that it also contains the pawls and all that stuff, which today live in the hub. So in that sense it makes sense that a stupid-expensive freewheel would be more expensive than a stupid-expensive cassette. But still.

As the creator of the Pistadex and someone who’s widely regarded as the cycling world’s Warren Buffett (though admittedly this has less to do with my business acumen and more to do with the fact that I’m also old and frail), all of this naturally led me to wonder if the alloy seven-speed Campagnolo freewheel could be a new financial instrument. Had I inadvertently stumbled on the new bitcoin? So I headed over to a popular online auction website and checked the prices. Yes, they were ridiculous, but clearly these things had not appreciated in value:

And even the most exotic specimens were well under a thousand dollars:

Clearly in the long term investing in Campagnolo freewheels is not going to beat the NASDAQ.

Nevertheless, in perusing the aforementioned auctioning site I did stumble upon this bit of treasure:

The Nishiki Cervino is one of the most obscure production bikes ever, uh, produced. It’s so obscure that it’s not even a cult item, and it makes bikes like the XO-1 and the RockCombo seem like Schwinn Varsities in comparison. Consequently, to be a Cervino owner is to know nothing of your own history, since as far as I can tell Nishiki only offered it in 1982, and you can’t even find a Nishiki catalogue for that year anywhere on the Internet, which quite frankly I find highly suspicious–almost like someone wants the Cervino erased from the collective memory:

By the way, it’s quite bold of this seller to accept returns on such an obscene item:

As anyone who peddles smut knows, rule number one is that you don’t accept returns, for obvious reasons. But I suppose the Internet has all but destroyed the market for adult-themed printed matter and the sellers have no other choice, for even Playboy vendors are now taking backsies:

In any case, so desperate was I to learn about the origins of the Cervino that I briefly considered spending the $54.99. (Especially, since as we’ve just established, I could return it immediately afterwards.) But fortunately the seller had included photographs of the whole damn thing and so I didn’t have to:

This rookie mistake may have cost him a sale, but it netted me the priceless experience of confirming that I am in fact the sort of person who will not accept less than the very best:

If you’re a vintage bike dork, there is probably no greater resource than this popular online auction website–not because you can buy stuff on it, but because it’s the most complete reference for bikes and bike parts in the world, all thanks to capitalism and the human impulse to try to get money for our old crap. Would I ever have found the catalogue entry for the Cervino if some nutjub didn’t think he could get $54.99 for it? Nope. Would I ever have figured out exactly what was wrong with the C-Record derailleur on the Vengeance Bike if I couldn’t look at all the other C-Record derailleurs listed on the aforementioned site, study the photos, and figure out what had broken? Also nope. Yes, every bike part you could possibly think of, all lovingly photographed from every angle in the hope of making a sale, is there for your perusal thanks to the elemental force that is commerce.

As for the catalogue, in addition to marketing blather and geometry specs concerning my Cervino, it also had information for the new Nishiki rider, and it was here that I made my most significant discovery:

Yes, the year was 1982. The mountain bike hardly even existed, let alone the gravel bike–and yet…and yet…PEOPLE WERE RIDING ON GRAVEL:

Astounding.

Simply astounding.