Originally Posted by
raymond1354
The question is really "What is being "restored"? Is it a Shelby being "restored", or is it what the Shelby represents (its cultural significance)?
Museum conservators basically take the position that the object only represents the culture of the time and it is the culture being "restored" through that object.
This happens all the time with "vintage" bikes. When someone goes OCD with "Period Correct" they are trying to maintain the congruity of the cultural significance of the object. If you put Ergos on a '65 Cinelli (which was the bees knees of it's time), it somehow doesn't work. All you have done is put Ergos on an old bike. But if you put repro decals and a repro headbadge on a '65, you reproduce the cultural significance of a '65 Cinelli. Without them you just have a Cinelli bike.
If it is necessary to start with a '68 Tang and then "restore" it to a Shelby in order to "restore" the cultural significance of a Shelby, then that's O.K. It works. But, it is not a Shelby. As soon as it is promoted as one, it is a fraud. The experience of creating the Shelby is the value, not the end result.
r
I agree with your thesis entirely. Moreover, I think it is something that is
not a trivial observation on this forum.
I have some bicycles that when I am casually talking to the uninitiated I refer to as "restored". But they are absolutely not. I do not have ergos on a 70's steel racing frame — not even a 10 speed free-hub conversion — but I would
never claim them to be "restored". The transmission may be a mix of Shimano 600, Ultegra and Dura Ace — all related in some way, but no way something that would have appeared on the 40 year old frame when it appeared in some shop window, or ordered by an athlete.
This does not mean that these machines mean any less to me personally. And it does not mean that I demean "restorations". If I had the money and time, I'd hunt the land and spend the money to restore my 'Simplon' or my 'Gazelle' to exactly how it would have appeared back in the day. But older group mixes, as well as new Nitto, MKS, Shimano, Tange and other modern parts are affordable, easy to find, and they do not look silly or out of place on an older frame. If you order some fresh reproductions of vintage decals on top of that, you may have earned a passport to time-travel back into cycling history.
Turning a Mustang into a resemblance of a Shelby machine may be fun, greatly satisfying and really worth doing, but I'd dare not call it a "Shelby".
Here is the worst that can happen: some mouth-breathing moron finds an
AC Bristol; he jazzes it up with flares, drops a steaming hot V-8 into it, paints some stripes and calls it a Cobra! That, my friends, is vandalism. And we have all seen that in the vintage bike world.