rootboy 

Quote of the week. Mind if I use that?

(I don't want to use it on anybody. I want to loan it to my wife to use

rootboy 

I don't thing you could even reach 25 km/h on that bike, C ! You'd be nuts to try.

rootboy 

I wondered where Flakey Foont had gotten to.

gaucho777 

Reminds me of the joint-venture between LOOK and Lacoste to produce the "ultimate" city bike. I'd never heard of them until I spied one in a window display off Place Vendome in Paris (a very ritzy part of the city, filled with jewelry stores catering to the ultra-rich). Price tag for the Look-Lacoste bike is 5,500 British Pounds, or around $8200 US! No thanks.



https://shop-uk.lacoste.com/Lacoste%2...,en_GB,pd.html

pastorbobnlnh 

...nor the way he's looking at the saddle!

GP must laugh all the way to the bank every time C&V starts a thread on him.

DIMcyclist

To quote George Takei, "Oh, Mmmyyyyyyy.... "

That Lacoste is So. Laughably. Wrong... Like, how much it laCOSTs? I get the impression that, considering both its price tag and the market it seems to be aimed at, the designers' idea of an ultimate city bike was one absolutely more worth stealing than half the cars in Paris.

As for the MoMA bike... sheesh- I'm sure that by now the Snob's ripped it (and maybe The Grant) a new one. It just looks like the ultimate toy-bike for any trendoid-yuppie with a secret fetish for 'whimsical' Portland plaid (as opposed to the 'dirty grunge' plaid we used to offend people with BITD).

I can hear it now: "But MoMA's in on it, so it has to be good design, riiight?"; "But GP had something to do with the design, so it must be solid, riiight?" In more ways than one, I'm guessing.

Oy vey... spare me & just go buy a Linus.

fender1

Did anybody bother to read that this is a fund raising item? Facts, schmacts, ATTACK! Reminds me of the Sean Hannity show in here.

bikingshearer 

Just what the world needs; an $8200 ghost bike.

oddjob2

Yes, yes, it's not easy to attract a museum director with a salary approaching $1.5 million and a lavish penthouse apartment overlooking the museum garden. That's after a haircut

https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-highest-paid/

curbtender

Actually don't mind the adds, as long as they don't follow you around. Hey...lots of people living off selling something you don't need. I'd like to hear Pope Francis's view on bikes.

ciocc_cat

Is that BEER in the box on the rear rack? Is it included as an accessory? Is it good beer? If so, marketing brilliance on the part of GP!

Fenway

The years of production I'm referring to had quality control and were before Raleigh turned into a profit from volume of sales monstrosity vs. profit from sales of a quality product. ~1930-late 1950s they were the highest quality mass produced bikes made with drop forged rather than stamped parts everywhere. A Sports from the 1950s is night and day from one from the 1970s-80s which were clearly inferior products.

I'd really like to see the sports of the 1950 (with all the little details, paint, striping, etchings, filigree, and fittings) reproduced with modern rims, seat posts & brakes/levers, standard threading, and a better designed rear carrier. Heck maybe even change the cottered cranks to the same type as modern Pashley's with the Heron motif.

Instead we get sloppily tig welded gas pipe with random parts from Taiwan and a premium up-charge for relatively generic & characterless bikes. Really how different are Publics from Papilons, Shinolas, the lastest 2013 KHS Green iteration, BikesDirect Windsors, Linus, etc from each other? And while I know a comparison could be made between the similarities of Philips to, Armstrong, Raleigh, Humber, Hercules, Rudge-Whitworth, but it isn't quite the same as this mass kit to order stuff from essentially the same factory in Asia.

Gravity Aided

Pashley's are fine looking bikes. They embody much of what I've seen in the older roadsters.

sykerocker 

A thought from a Southern redneck country boy: Damn! New York City is nothing but ******s after all!

Edit: Just discovered a new word that auto-bleeps. Starts with a 'f' and the middle two letters are 'gg'.

auchencrow

Gee, oddjob, it's a cryin' shame he had to "weather the recession" by taking that haircut.
- But it's a good thing he can still afford to hire GP to tell us that pink step-throughs with white tires are really "men's" bikes.

Creme Brulee

homophobia aside, all of us on this forum know that we can get a really super nice vintage bike for 600 dollars, but most people, if you can believe it, don't want to learn about old bikes, whats good and what isn't, scour craigslist and ebay, or have to adjust something right off the bat. They just want to walk into a bike shop and buy a bike that is ready to go. Considering that, this bike is way better than most you can buy in a shop new. Its not some nerdy fred bike. it's not a fake nu-fred porteur frenchy bike. It's just a bike for riding to the store and to work comfortably, that you can lock up and not really worry about. This is the kind of bike that gets non-bike people on bikes and theres nothin wrong with that.

ColonelJLloyd 

auchencrow

I used to respect Grant P as a businessman - but I can't respect someone who has to redefine the language to sell what he's selling.
Sound familiar?

Gravity Aided

Industry invents a lot of things, including language, to sell what they innovate. Trek, Specialized, Cannondale have all learned you can charge a lot of money for a bicycle.

hagen2456

VERY good point. At times, when in my paranoid mood, I think it's because such bikes would be too sturdy, thus making sales dwindle. And you're bloody rigth that even rather expensive bikes like Batavus are basically crap. Way too many superfluous details, and way too many plastic parts. Changing a tyre, or making any other sort of repair on those bikes, involves silly amounts of work, and the risk of plastic parts breaking. Pah! And why do they have to be so crazy heavy?

I our day and time, it should be possible to produce REAL bikes at the same price. And I tend to be, well, a bit paranoid about why it doesn't happen.

The Golden Boy 

I don't know- my wife is not a bike person. We got a new Trek hybrid for 400 and it's a cool lookin' bike, it's light, it's comfortable, it's practical and she loves it much more than any fancy pants bike I pointed her to.

Aside from comfort and practicality, there is the whole factor of wanting to be cool. Maybe if you don't want to look at it from that way- it's not wanting to look like a dork.

As much as I disagree with Grant's concept of creating a "group" to belong to called "the un-racer," most of the properties of that "group" are, to me, just good fun bicycling. To that end, having a bike that you enjoy having is a part of that.

Maybe I'm not in tune with the realities of riding a bike in NYC, but that does not look like a bike that would be cool having.

Chrome Molly

And now, the performance benefits of playing cards in the spokes.... For men that is....

rrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRRrrrrrRRRRrrrrr

Italuminium

You obviously have never borrowed your mom's bike to go to school, running late as soon as you put the hammer down and start pulling on the bars, the bars actually move several inches back and forth. Scary. On old style "oma bikes" at least, made with traditional 1" tubing. On modern bikes, like the Cortina (very popular now) the hugely oversized tubing negates this effect.

hagen2456

Going 25 km/h is no problem on a 50-60 years old standard ladies' bike, given that it's been well looked after or restored. It's hard work, sure, but in no way risky. On modern equivalents? Not so much. Most of them are crap.

qcpmsame 

Only 7 more pages to go for the usual 10 page GP thread minimums.

Bill