Last summer, as I was getting sucked into this C&V world (feeling at times like Alice going down the rabbit hole), I looked at a local CL ad that was about to expire, and found this bike. I’d ignored the ad because it featured a photo of a Marin Eldridge mountain bike, and the title Mountain and racing bike - $800. Eventually, out of boredom with the slim pickings in Shreveport, I clicked on the ad -- inside it showed a second photo, and virtually no additional info, except the indication that the seller wanted $800 each for two different bikes. This was the second bike photo:



I thought it might be a scam (the address mapped to a poor, industrial section of town), or yet another ignorant CL seller calling an old road bike a racing bike. It looked very tired, especially the worn yellow saddle. The name, which I misread as 'Commasini', was unknown to me. But because the pickings in this neck of the woods are so slim, I did a search anyway. Somehow Google understood, and took me to Randyjawa’s website page for his Tommasini. There I read the line about him originally tracking his blue Tommi because of a yellow Turbo seat, and had a literal aha moment. I realized what I thought was junk was perhaps something special. You can read my exploration and attempts to buy the bike on this thread, where I even managed to misspell Tommasini in the title.

Here it is now:



As found, it featured a full Campagnolo Nuovo Record gruppo except period-correct teardrop Simplex Retrofriction shifters, and early Look clipless pedals. The jockey wheels had been replaced with Suntour wheels, and the freewheel was a Suntour gold-finish Perfect corncob 13-18t without date code. Crankset: NR 42/52 172.5mm. The seat post is SR/NR 27.2 mm with the aforementioned yellow Turbo saddle. Wheels and tires: Record hubs/Wobler Aspin tubular rims with Continental Competition Vectran tublars. Headset is Campy 1039 NR. Bars were Cinelli 66-42 Campione del Mondo bars with twinned flying C logos, sporting an Avocet 30 cyclometer from the mid-80s. And two vintage white-painted aluminum Blackburn bottle cages with faded red plastic tips.

At first I thought it was a bit too big for me, but on careful measuring I found it was amazingly close to the measurements of my Cannondale. However, it had some rust spots, the paint was horribly faded, and the stem was very stuck. Based on advice here, I offered to pay no more than what I thought I could reliably sell the Campy NR parts for, in case other components were seized and the frame was full of rust. Long story short, the seller declined my offer of $300, I circled back after about 6 weeks, and made the deal. With the bike came a gym bag packed with some goodies, which I'll describe later.