Maybe your bicycle maintenance has instilled in them the value and pleasure of manually controlling their world. Or maybe something in the air, some unspoken meme is hinting that we should start controlling machines.

Global warming and oil crisis is growing the idea in the back of our minds that one day we'll have to use our hands to find food and survive. Just look at that movie with Will Smith hunting deer in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan.

Maybe in the smallest ways, kids are going to develop a tendency to want to train themselves to have better manual control over their environment.

So we now have a profile of the steel bike enthusiast : if a guy has good quality old stereo, plays guitar and grouches about what's the point of educating 90% of the young beyond there mental capacity, therefore ensuring they don't even know the basics, the odds are he is a bike collector.

You got it London buses are red ergo: everything red is a London bus. I see now

I sometimes wish I hadn't started this thread . It was only intended as an amusing anecdote, not as a means to bash young folks for lack of knowledge. There will be just as many kids who want to learn how things work, its just that their interests will fall upon different things. There will also be lot's of "old stuff" for them to play with, but it won't be the old stuff we had, because that is all worth $$$ on Ebay thanks to the rabid nostalgia economy. For example, the last, rather shabby "bike boom era" Motobecane that I saw in a goodwill store in Mountain View was priced at $250 What lucky kid wouldn't be happy to give up his playstation for that treasure?

It's a funny old world, but I like it.

goodwill selling bikes for $250.00? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I honestly had to look twice at the tag, thinking I'd misread the decimal point... $25 and I might have bought it.

I have 35+ year old Dynaco speakers hooked up to a 3 year old Onkyo receiver, I'll take those speakers to my grave! Up until a month ago, I had my sound card on my computer hooked up to the 35+ year old JVC receiver that came with the speakers so I could run regular speakers on my computer. Then the receiver finally died, so now I have to find another old receiver for cheap!

As for albums sounding better than CD's, not to my ears! I have 100's of albums and a good turntable, there is no sound that can be produced by an album that can't also be reproduced by a CD. The opposite is true though as CD's have a larger dynamic range. The big problem is that so many CD's are engineered and mixed by people with less talent than the people who mixed the albums in the past. Pops and clicks aren't warmth to my ear.

My JVC receiver was secreted (no doubt illegally) away from the waste disposal center when no-one was looking (Model RS 7 if I recall correctly). Having just been robbed of $70 to drop off some old matresses & bed frames, I was delighted to get something in return. A cheap guitar amplifier also made it back. The gamble paid off - the receiver had a dodgy solder joint, the guitar amp a broken input jack. Both problems were quickly and easily fixed.

Again this is offtopic in a sense, but at the end you'll see it's not (how's that for the most lousy opening paragraph of all time ?) : Christian Yvon (Goldmund, Apertura... may he forgive me for naming him, amongst his clients are people who govern places in America beginning with Cal and other such well off guys) clearly demonstrated to me that binary (digital) will not reproduce the trebles like a vinyl. On a oscillograph, or whatever the thing is called, you can clearly see a square tip on the high treble, whereas you have a real triangle on vinyl, or any other analog source. The binary sound is not "true". Then there is the MP3 thing: partly a cutoff of the frequencies supposedly not heard by the human ear. Extensive double blind testing showed that all , even the tone deaf heard a richer sound on non MP3, or to be more precise, non-cutoff. Pure logic within our limited comprehension of sound perception says this is impossible. So what is hapening is that we are not just hearing music, but feeling it too, for what is sound but air pressure ? This needs to be mitigated by the fact that most recordings are not neutral, so the billion dollar search for the perfectly neutral system is futile, not counting that different individuals will have a different "ear". Anyway, the Acid test of a stereo system is a prolonged, very fast sequence at the very right of the piano keyboard. Most systems will fail this test most horribly.

The parallel with vintage steel bikes ? Harmonics play a great part in the rider's perception of what a bike "feels" like, and with steel there is a heck of a lot of vibrations and harmonics of all lengths going on, and those vibes affect as said what you feel, but also how the bike performs for you. Making a bike too rigid as in carbon, not counting the damping effect of the medium (araldite basically), makes for a poor ride. So maybe the hippies were right about "vibes" .

Anybody doesn't agree with me can nominate me for an honorary phd in aggravated bs., because this "demonstration" suffers no possible argument, the only contradiction can be deliberate misunderstanding

CD can sound good, but it takes the Norton sampling theorem to its absolute limit at the highest range of the frequency response, that is: only two samples of the signal per period of it's oscillation. Luckily few of us have ears that can hear 20Khz. Maybe dogs love vinyl

And they needed tuned up every 15,000 instead of 100,000. Better?

Of course new technology is better in that sense. But it's also satisfying to know that you can dissasemble something, see how it works, and repair it by yourself.

I agree completely on the bike harmonics. My old steel bike sounds different than my OCR3. I don't know if it is the way steel vibrates compared to aluminum, or if it is the different wheels, but it just has a different harmonic. It also helps that the steel bike is quiet as a cathedral while the modern bike seems to always have at least one thing that is rattling! I'll chase them all down eventually.

15,000? By 'eck lad, thee were lucky. I 'ave to check 't points every 5,000 miles and change the oil and set 't valves. And them king pins don't grease'emselves. Kid's today, they don't know their born.

[/Monty Python]

I had a MGA that was lucky to get a thousand without something needing tweaked.

Very few days go by in which I am not thankful for how much easier my old bikes are to fix and maintain, compared to my 1974 Saab 99 (which I drove 'til 2007). One time the throttle cable snapped as I was getting on the Washington, DC beltway (scary); after being stranded in the median for several hours, I had it towed to a bike shop and replaced it with a good quality MTB brake cable. Worked great for years after that.

(Now, I'm up to a comparatively modern '83 Volvo...I locked my keys in it the other day and was surprised that the tow-truck guys no longer have "Slim Jims" to get into cars with manual door locks.)

I also have a rotary phone, which works great when my cell phone doesn't. Which is most of the time.

The thing about records, though: I bought tons of vinyl in the '90s and early '00s -- the CD era -- when no one wanted it and it was cheap. Now CDs are getting antiquated and vinyl is getting expensive. I liked it better before.

Oh, and +1 on the external-frame backpacks. I use my dad's circa-1988 Jansport; for his part, he's gone Golight (no frame at all...basically just an ultralight duffel bag with straps. Weighs nothing, but you have to pack it strategically).

In all honesty, I bet you have had some practice with the Lucas electrical system over the years

Questionable speaker placement.


The cloud of smug hanging over this thread is suffocating.

Try to remember when you were young and dumb and full of ..... something.

How about this speaker placement?

I get the same reaction from "new" cyclists who see me riding my '69 Raleigh Grand Prix. As the original owner, I really appreciate the manufacturing excellence that went into my bike.

Smug ? Probably not. Is it forbidden to achieve what you want in life to some extent, and be happy with that ? Remeber being young ? Sure, I remeber being young, everybody does. And not all of us regret having matured a bit and lost some narrow certitudes. As to the speaker placement, yeah, sure, it's questionnable. But as you can't see the other speakers, nor the room, even less where I sit in the room, the acoustics of the place, plus it's my setup, I get to decide where the speakers are placed

Oh yes, but it was not as bad as previous owner "fixes". Once I understood what the system should do, I replaced all the wiring in its entirety with a nice new harness.


As for smug, I try not to be. I enjoy my old stuff, and try to explain that joy to others. I like some new stuff too!

This entire thread is like a Billy Joel song!

and I quote:

"You know the good ole days weren't always good
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems

Now I told you my reasons for the whole revival
Now I'm going outside to have an ice cold beer in the shade
Oh, I'm going to listen to my 45's
Ain't it wonderful to be alive
When the rock 'n' roll plays, yeah
When the memory stays, yeah
I'm keeping the faith"

OK, Bianchigirl, I give up. What IS this thing?

twas answered several posts later.