I'll toss this one out as an example of how much you can overbuild gas pipe, when the original frame is worthwhile. It's a late 60's Magneet. Originally it came with: Campy Valentino, steel cottered crank, CLB racer brakes, 3-piece steel hubs with wing nuts, Rigida steel rims, CLB alloy stem with steel Maes-pattern bars. What, a few years later would be considered a Bike Boom special. Probably sold, new, for about $80.00.

Typical . . . . . . . . . except that it's Dutch. And if my Bike Boom years in the business taught me anything, it's that a bottom line Dutch or Belgian frame will outride anything else in the price competition, both for comfort, fit and finish. So I started to upgrade:



The final results: the frame, stem, dork disc and seatpost are original. Drivetrain is SunTour V/Compe-V/bar end rachet shifters. Crank is a Stronglight 99 triple. Brakes are Weinmann. Wheels are Normandy hubs with Weinmann alloy rims. Favorit saddle, Velo Orange mudguards, Pletscher rack. And the final result is every bit as good as the '72 World Voyageur I rode back then.

It's funny . . . . . . doing this to a cheap Magneet back in 1972 would have been inconceivable, since I'd have been buying all the parts new, at full retail. Not on that cheap a frame. Today, all the used parts around make it possible to take a frame to it's logical conclusion, without worrying about where it fit in the market.