Originally Posted by
rosefarts
I think they're supposed to be shellacked from what I've read recently. Gives it more color and makes it easier to clean. Without shellac, i i thknit would have to black.
Nobody shellacked cotton tape then. Wasn't done.* It was a French randonneur thing that you realistically never saw in real life, like 650B. It's only become somewhat more common recently, like post 2000 or so. *(doesn't mean you can't do it now)
I also concur that racers never doubled up the tape, black was more popular than white - for obvious reasons, and if you run out of tape you are overlapping it too much or trying to do that dumb X thing around the levers. White was cool though, cuz Eddy. Yeah, it will get dirty fast. All colors were used. Then as now people had their own preferences. As always, there's going to be a one in a million exception out there somewhere, but this was general practice, at least in norcal/nev.