Originally Posted by
T-Mar
I strongly suspect the OP's girlfriend's bicycle is a 1989 model. None of the 1986-1988 models came with a 24" front wheel nor had internal cable routing for rear the brake cable. I have no 1989 literature but in 1990 Miele offered two Infinity models, the Tournet and Volta, with Exage Motion and Exage 300EX respectively. Neither was offered with a 24" front wheel but both had internal cable routing for the rear (though by this time they were using the plastic inserts). The process of elimination suggests that 1989 is the best candidate, which corroborates well with the crankset date code. The tubeset suggests it may be a Tournet or Volta. The components do seem quite low end, especially the deailleurs, but this may have been frankenbiked to a degree.
For whatever reason, the weird story I was given about this bike, and the weird assortment of parts on it has been niggling at me.
One idea I had: did Miele ever sell framesets? I feel like a lot of things about this bike would make sense if it was bought as a frame and built up by a bike shop before being transferred to the owner, and eventually put into storage.
That, or the guy that sold it to me just likes to fix up bikes and tell tall tales about them.