JunkYardBike

Spring is in the air! For some reason, I thought the winter building season was a better time to sell parts, but so far this spring I've seen some crazy final auction prices on ebay.

I've got a set of Kooka Racha levers, so I've been watching closed auctions for a few months. During the winter, sets in excellent condition were consistently fetching about $75. These closed at $158!!!

Move over Campagnolo!

https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...#ht_500wt_1156

Chris_in_Miami

Jeez, I passed on a red anodized set of those at the flea market a few months ago.

BluesDaddy

People like me, who were young and poor during the mountain bike boom of the early 90s are now older and (in some cases) richer still lust over the chi-chi boutique CNC components of that time. I personally would love to have some of these land in my lap:

Elev12k

Mountainbikes and mountainbiking triggered my enthousiasm for cycling a couple decades ago. I indeed had limited funds back in the day. Around 2000 I surfed to various than new classified and auction sites and were surprised how cheap the old top end bikes were. That was what my collecting habbit started. Prices went up since than, but the habbit never left

With this pic a contribution to the CNC 'bling' by me >>



Caramba Double Barrel

DRietz

Mel - do you happen to have any super compact CNC cranks? It'd be awesome to have one on my modern mountain build!

Henry III

I was still in my BMX stage in high school when the MTB boom hit with the Kooka, Ringle and every other CNC part maker. The closest thing I had to stuff like that were my Nuke Proof hubs and Cooks Bros cranks on my cruiser. I still remember looking at all those parts and every color of the rainbow they make stuff in. What ever happened to Kooka and the rest of those companies?

JunkYardBike

All I know is that when I saw these levers I had to have them. They're gorgeous. I admit my interest is more aesthetic than utilitarian. These things are like jewelry and they weigh less than a feather!

I've seen quite a few cracked CNC cranks. I think all these parts may have suffered durability issues. Production costs may also have driven them out of business, having to compete with Asian manufacturers. That's just my uneducated guess, though.

Nice photo, Elev12K. I like the Christmas motif (whether or not you intended it!).

Elev12k

I am afraid I do not have. What do you mean with 'super compact' btw?

Road Fan

I only understand "super compact" loosely. I think it means a crank that rather than having 110/74 BCDs, would have more 50 (or so) /94 mm bcds, and allow triples something like 42/32/20. With an 11-tooth small-end on the cassette, you can get a monstrous gear range with cassettes in the 11/25 or 11/27 range. 42/11 gets you in teh 100 inch range at the "fast" end. Sugino Impel is out on the 'Bay now, for an example.

I really like those Carambas. I could easily see breakage due to stress risers, given all that sharp-edged machining. Engineering-wise there are a lot of stress risers, and a lot of sharp edges surprisingly close to the spindle and pedal interfaces. Today I'd expect a designer to use a finite-element stress analysis to explore the potential existence of stress concentrations. Back then these techniques might have been aerospace-only.

Bikedued

I have a set of those levers in "mint never been used" condition. I think they will be moving indoors from the balcony storage unit now! ,,,,BD

Chris_in_Miami

Went back to the flea market today, and learned my memory is not so sharp - they were blue Thanks to JYB for cluing me in! The vendor also had a set of Paul Stoplights, but they were missing the bushing and springs, and only had two of the pad holders. Could have had them for a few dollars, but I'll let them be someone else's score of the day...