It's funny how certain type of parts seem to pop up all of a sudden and then suddenly fade away.
I still remember a couple of years ago when I had zero luck finding Mavic 800 series deraileurs in ebay, specially the "erector style" 851 RD.
Suddenly about a little over a year ago, they started appearing, first very slowly with a trickle of a couple of marginal condition used ones here and at very high prices, then a good wave with few always on auction everyday at eBay, a good number of them NOS. At first, they went for almost $200 dollars for NOS examples, now the prices for the erector RD is down substantially at sometimes even below $120. Now that the rush for the 851s have pretty much ended, they pretty much dissapeared again with only a couple of beat up ones popping up here and there once in a while.
I think the market for sertain items like these tend to overheat and the bubble pops. Everyone then moves to looking for another component item.
Another good example of these classic components going throught he pricing and availability rollercoaster, the once ubiquitous Stronglight A9 headsets are now considered as rare as chicken lips and as expensive as their weight in gold....Dang!, A9s used to come with even the cheapest Treks back in the 80's a a multitude of manufacturers had them as standard on many of their bike models back then. In the late 80's I even remember seeing whole bunches of A9s being sold at large Trek dealer clearance bins just zipped tied together and being bounced around by shoppers. I should have grabbed a boxfull of them back then, and I could sell them at way over 100 bucks a pop easy these days!
So, who the heck is hoarding all that 80s clear brake cable casing sets??!!.........How much for 20 feet of the stuf??........

Chombi