Motobecane Grand Touring
^Just my C&V crankiness coming out.^
French bikes seem to get dumped on because of unique threads and component sizes. Peugeot, Gitane and others put out a nice line of bikes.
My gripe with Japanese bikes is they lack character. They are perfect robot built bikes. The 70's French, English, italian bikes were made by hand. I like their quirky, sometimes sloppy handiwork. The bike I am riding now is French. Its obvious that someone in the paint department at Follis dropped a paint brush or tin of gold paint on the down tube. There is a gold haze that sort of drips down and around the tube for a couple inches. I like it. Tells me there was a lot of handwork in the production of the bike.