Originally Posted by
Wileyone
"Not particularly knowledgeable"
"In terms of monetary value, these are pretty much bottom of the bin"
Bottom of the bin..."Not particularly knowledgeable" You hit the nail on the head with this statement...
These were Hand made British Bikes using Reynolds 531 Tubing. How does that make them "bottom of the bin"??
...I think maybe you have an erroneous impression of all the different bicycles that sported Coventry Eagle headbadges over the years.
Admittedly, the brand name is a little confused, but the older ones gradually morphed into Falcon bikes (again, various models and levels of quality).
The high end bikes in either the Merckx or the Falcon line were comparable in quality to the other premier marques of their day, British and Italian, offering great handling with a fairly tight stage race geometry with arguably better finish than the Italian competitors.By 1978, Falcon was purchased by the Elswick-Hopper group (which by this point included Wearwell), becoming Elswick-Falcon (1982), and it in turn purchased
Holdsworth (including
Claud Butler ) in 1987, b
efore the whole firm was acquired by Townsend (Casket) in 1991, who had also acquired Ernie Clement's old firm Coventry Eagle. Mr. Clements moved to Ledbury and ran his own cycling shop from 1989 until his death in 2006, although it is unclear if he continued to make frames.
Falcon Bicycles
At any rate, the only Coventry Eagle I've seen in person was a rather disappointing frame. The headbadge was still impressive, though.
To state, as you have, that all of them were hand made 531 bikes is wrong in my experience.