How do you decide if a vintage bike should be restored for display or modified to be ridden? Simply stated, a vintage race bike isn’t a vintage race car. While the motor of a vintage race car stays pretty much as it always was, the motor to a vintage bike is you, and you age.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas-Fern Hill

Love that poem.

So here’s the rub, I have four Japanese racing bikes one has been restored but with a 42 x19 as my best hill gear this is more risk than I will take with older joints and muscles. So it is functional art in my office, but with the other three I have made modifications, bigger gearing/more gears/SPD pedals and ride them, but there is a troubling bit of doubt. A vintage race car is the experience of a moment in time. Sure, you can swap in modern brakes, engines, etc., but what have you lost, the experience. Yet unlike a vintage race car’s engine our body is a wasting asset. A Briggs & Stratton in place of a Cooper Climax would be an awful thing, yet, to date, you cannot rebuild yourself to 20. So you change the gearing and with judicious vintage/modern components (triplizers) you extend the years of use and the joy of another days ride.

But where is the edge? Where should you stop and hang up a bike of memories, rather than erase it with change?

I welcome your thoughts.