Your qualification of industrial art is as slippery as any other definition. Like art, some will have more generalized appreciation and consensus as to status. I really don't think most guys like Ugo, Cino and Eisentraut were creating industrial art - they were making bicycles designed to be ridden and successfully marketed.

Defining classic is by nature subjective - we're a big tent regarding our opinions.

Touchdown.

Thanks for the post.

Fairly trollish curious. Ask a question, feign curiosity, then disagree with the answers?
If you already knew the answers, and had your own definitions, why did you ask?
Were you only seeking a target at which to level volleys?

A man walks into a bar, he sees a classic bike and a vintage bike.
Which one does he steal? The one that fits......his definition.

I got what I asked for - information. I posted my interpretation of that information. Offended? Don't read it.

Vintage as abused by enthusiastic craigslist sellers is anything that is out of date that requires a marketing happy adjective to promote it.

Plenty of sloping top tube bikes ARE vintage from near the turn of the 20th century. It went away then returned.

Threadless headsets are old too, my tricycle even had one.

You are going to have to do better and do more research.
This has by the way been discussed a number of times in this forum, every time with a bit of a twist.

Thanks - I wasn't privy to the history. Thanks again for the information. I'm done.

Classic is fixed gear. Derailleurs are nothing but trendy crap that will never stick.

Vintage is old crap not cool enough to be classic.

Nothing offensive in it.
Appears more presumptive than anything.
Reaching and grasping are two different things.

Welcome to the forum.

Just curious.

"Was your dad in the service?" - Michael Scott

the clothes are classic, the bike is vintage. In my opinion. And everyone else is wrong.

PS: if you've ever met sykerocker, he dresses like that, casually impeccable, and makes it look 100% normal in this day and age. Women were all over him at NAHBS Richmond.

I wish someone would invent a way to quickly release my hubs from the dropouts to make wheel removal far easier and faster.

Shout out to Frank Lenz! (The guy that went to look for him, William Sachtleben, was from my home town.) But I digress...

It may be just a matter of age, but I think with automobiles classic status ends with the decline of the carb and the advent of more uniform aerodynamic styling. We see cars from the mid 70s that didn't merit attention then heralded as classics now. I don't think I'll live to see the same thing happen with cars made a decade later.

I'm not sure carbon frames with brifters will achieve the same classic appeal as steel tubing and DT shifters as long as they remain the dominant market model. It's hard to be old school without some significant distinctions from the modern.

When you ask a question that is essentially un-answerable, you're gonna get all kinds of answers.

huh ?…..

Classic: A work of enduring excellence. (Age is irrelevant.)
Vintage: Referring to a specific year/time period (no mention of quality).

F'rinstance, my 2004 Merckx Team SC is a classic despite only being 10 years old. Definitely not "vintage" in the common parlance.

SP
OC, OR

Classic is "lugged" and Vintage is "steel". Your welcome.

Thank goodness ... having just purchased what I believed would be a classic bike, I was beginning to think that it wouldn't fit either category.
Per the above I now know it's both classic and vintage .

2012 DeRosa Neo Primato. (Okay - vintage may be a stretch)

This is classic:



This is is vintage:



This is classic and vintage:

To quote my favorite gearhead author, Peter Egan, a Classic is "Something that never gets old, even when it is."

I just made perfect, hard boiled egg.

For a pictorial definition, I think this is perfect.

Of course, there seems to be a move from aluminum levers to plastic levers, plastic wrapped with carbon fiber, and carbon fiber levers.

So, the brifters with aluminum levers are already headed to classic status, or being used in classic restorations.

8 Speed is also heading to Vintage/Classic, and perhaps 9 speed will be soon to follow as the 10/11 speed configurations now dominate at least the high-end markets.

That reminds me.

I should post some pics of my finished Kvale.

I thought that there might be some specific criteria. According to some, there are; others say no. I naively thought that I"d just missed the sticky or that it was "common knowledge." I was mistaken.

Because it wasn't in a sticky, I should have assumed that I was opening a can of worms (that others had opened previously). And since it is an obvious question, I should have searched the forum before posting it again; mea culpa.

I do apologize for my errors, but I really and truly didn't want to create any controversy or to troll the forum. If the moderator would be so kind as to post a sticky about the elastic criteria for the terms, this (probably) wouldn't happen again.

By asking the unanswerable question (yet again), I've been accused of being "trollish," "grasping," and "presumptive" when I was merely curious (and somewhat foolish). So I apologize. I darned sure won't ask again.

Cordially - FH

And the fillet-brazed frames quietly weep.