There is a tendency to look back with rose colored glasses in the world of bikes, guitars and amps, whatever. The majority of 1970s bikes were really crappy, not even as good as most of the bikes currently sold at Target. I spent many hours in my bike shop wrench days fixing the "BMA/6" bikes to try to make them operable. Even the lower end imports from Motobecane, Gitane, Peugeot, etc., were pretty much junk. And the top end bikes weren't much better made than the current mid-level bikes from Rivendell.
While the Bridgestones of yore are highly revered, the current offerings from Riv and others blow them out of the water. My wife's Heron is vastly better made than her 1993 XO-1 was. The brazing on the XO-1 was crude, the lugs were crude, the paint was crude by comparison. All of the AHHs and Atlantises and Rambouillets etc. that I have seen are far, far better made bikes than the old Bridgestones. As for components, modern mid-level stuff is far better designed and made than the old mid-level stuff. At the top end the modern stuff works better than the old stuff... although I much prefer the looks of Nuovo Record and I use friction shifting on most of my bikes :-) We all have our rose colored glasses. Tim On Apr 13, 2013, at 10:15 AM, Jim Thill - Hiawatha Cyclery <thill....@gmail.com> wrote: > It may be blasphemous to say, but bikes have improved over the decades. Just > something simple: almost all new non-race bikes have rack mounts and bottle > bosses. Try to find that feature on most 1970s bikes. And fattish tire > clearance is easier to find on current bikes than on bikes from earlier > generations. Also, I have to believe that most cyclists prefer indexed > shifting (RBW people excepted). And don't get me started on brakes! And smart > gearing! Every time I've tried to resurrect an old bike, even one in good > shape, I've had to modernize some of the components to suit my preferences. > That could run into many hundreds of dollars. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "RBW Owners Bunch" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
