Holy cr@p to both the miniature bicycles and the 312 Ferrari! Way back I wanted to build a small boat. One piece of advice came from Harold Payson the author of Instant Boats was before building the full size boat, build a miniature. He was right. I could work out all the details in about a day what would take a week or more full sized. I ended up building about a 12 scale boats that I was interested in.

While this does tempt me into making bike frames in miniature to get the details around tire clearance and the rear triangle worked out, this Cinelli miniature is just another level of attention and execution of detail. I thought it was photoshopped. I was looking at the tires, chain, cable guides, chrome lugs, spoke nipples and tire valves and the proportions looked pretty good. The spoke nipples may be slightly chunky, but that is splitting hairs and even more so, because the wheels were built with spokes that seem to be to scale, the wheels are true and the brakes work.

Sheldon Brown had one of his gag webpages talking about taking removing all the rivets in the chain, cleaning each link and reassembling. Did they photoetch the links to make over 200 miniature links, create bushings and rivets and assemble the chain link by link?

How were the tires made? I am going to guess tubulars and sewn up. Then how was the inner tube made. If it were me, I'd skip all that pneumatic tire stuff and just put some sort of foam bucatini in. This build is so detailed and true to the original I wouldn't be surprised if it had inner tubes and held air.

This Cinelli model is incredible!