The Best Things in Life - Shopping for an Electric Guitar

25 Good Summers to Master the Campagnolo Super Record of Guitars

Every so often people will ask if I will go shopping for a bike with them. Crazy thing to do, because I am a race-bike anorak of Olympic standard, so when it comes to that moment where you ask "what would you do?" I have to lie.

I will tell you "sure take the $899 Giant with 9 speed, it will do fine" or "105's really just a couple of seasons ago's Dura Ace" hoping like hell you never get to be really passionate about cycling as you will realise that what I meant to say was "sell everything you have to buy the Colnago with the Record groupset".

It's not that I'm a bad person, I just can't bear to explain to you the insanity of how only 0.0005% of the population are going to get what it means to have Record over Chorus - and how it gets to the very essence of road cycling. Just a fleeting glimpse of Bianchi's celeste paintwork gives me the torrent of emotions that is Fausto Coppi's life story, the 20th century history of Europe, life, death, honour and betrayal. Not logic, emotion.

This week, after a moment of 'why die wondering?' madness, I turned out for the Lonely Planet Band's first Winter rehearsal of 2009 and amazingly was not sent home or made to put my guitar down and stand in the corner. A bunch of real musicians let me strum along on my Seagull acoustic as loud as I possibly could, showing me chords and filling a hole in my heart that has been empty forever.

To be fair, un-miked, they could not even tell how craptapulous I was. An acoustic guitar falling in behind 3 Fenders, a Gibson and a whopping bass, maketh no sound in the forest. I did learn to strum my guitar louder and harder than I ever thought possible!

So when I quizzed the LP Guitar Jedi Council on what to do (having brought a knife to a gunfight in guitar terms), I was super-sensitive to any diplomatic "get a cheap guitar and amp and see how you go" responses. There were none. These are my kind of passionate people, and Ian even offered to give up his Saturday morning (and risk being late for his beloved Bombers playing the Anzac Day game with Collingwood) to check out the wares of Anthony at The Guitar Colonel in South Melbourne.

We met at 10:30, and the next 3 hours were spent in some weird space-time warp trying 10 or so vintage guitars from Fender Tele's and a Strat to Gibson Firebirds and and S5. Ian's eye had already fallen on a 1996 Fender Blues Junior 15 watt valve amp, which was not negotiable if a guitar was to be had.

By noon it was obvious, even to a 5 chord duffer like me that the Strat was it. Way beyond initial budget, this was just the right thing to do. And nor did Ian bullshit me like I'm going to bullshit you if you take me along on a bike-buying mission. He just turned the amp to 11, let a few licks of Stairway loose and we were not for one moment 'denied' the thrill of gold-class living. That's the moment in the photo above.

Sadly, the white one was sold, but the black 1994 Strat 57 Reissue will be mine.

That legendary Wayne's World Moment

And just to remind you what it is all about...



Why 25 Good Summers?

At 45, I figure that by 70 I had better have this thing sorted. That's 25 summer's worth of practice on the rooftop to go.

Hercules vintage cycling billboard

Around 1992 I was visiting friends in Christchurch when Vivienne the keen-eyed treasure spotter mentioned a poster she'd seen in an auction house in the city - on my favourite subject of course. As it turned out, hardly a poster - this thing was 3 metres tall!

It had been folded for decades, but the colours were true as the day they were printed (using stone lithograph process). It was an eye-watering amount of money for a piece of art that would be un-hangable in most homes. As luck would have it, we had a major wall in our house that we could have squeezed it onto.

The years that followed were spent asking ourselves the constant question - what the hell would be do with that billboard? Through a friend of a friend we had the major folds reduced professionally, and put it in a protective roll. How to actually transform it into art was not so easy. As we talked ourselves up on its rarity and value (who keeps billboards?) we talked ourselves out of exposing it to light at all. Back in the roll it went.

In Manhattan later in the 1990s we visited an amazing poster gallery (squeezed up some stairs, around a corner - classic 19th century workshop industrial space converted to gallery) who had some good ideas about backing it on canvas but the scale of the job left furrowed brows. How would we get it back from the USA?

I have managed to find a lot out about Hercules - founded in 1911 they were the major force in British bike manufacture in the early 20th century. A website called Made in Birmingham celebrates their achievements, and maps their sad demise over time. In 1928 Hercules made over 250,000 bikes, exported 26% of all British cycles and by 1935 this figure had increased to nearly 40%!

There is a great photo-stream on Flickr on Hercules bikes. This image is from that stream, and you can see the similarities of the artwork and styling.

After WW2 the steel supplier to Hercules (Tube Investments - later known as TI) took them over, and by the 1960s the Hercules brand was in decline, eventually subsumed under the more popular Raleigh name along with most of Britain's bike brands, other than modern legends like Mercien, Dawes and Condor.

The name lives on in India, where they make 'old school' Hercules bikes pretty similar to the bikes in the poster.

The 1930s is around the period of the billboard from what I can deduce. Christchurch in NZ was a cycling hotbed in this period. My BSA racing bike came from Christchurch (spotted coincidentally by Vivienne's husband Ian! NZ is a small place and these 2 knew their trash from their treasure), and there is quite a lot of historical information around about the racing scene in this part of the South Island.

I imagine a poor billboard hanger getting to the end of his week, having laboured hard to put up this fortnight's advertising artwork, finding it in the back of his old van and figuring they'd done enough for the week and it could wait. Somehow it never got posted, and never got lost. A note on the back says it is 1 of 16 printed.

In a recent, slightly bizarre coincidence I discovered Studio M in Sydney, and a fellow called Michael Brewster who is Australia's expert on dealing with vintage posters. I'm planning on giving Michael the poster to see what miracles he can perform with it. The coincidence? Michael worked at the poster gallery in Manhattan that we visited in our earlier search for a solution in the 1990s.

Holden v Ford - Holden wins yet another major event.

Not only did we win, but we pissed all over Ford on this one.

I should declare up front (like you hadn't already guessed), probably owing to the second car I can recall my family owning being a Holden stationwagon around 1970, I am clearly of the General Motors tribe. I am hardwired to Holden.

The next family car was (not surprisingly) another Holden wagon reg GL6205 - burned into my male homo trivia subconcious for god knows what reason, and apart from a brief sojourn with the dark side when my brother-in-law Alan sold me his Fairmont wagon in the early 1990s, I've been right behind the lion with his paw on the wheel.

That Fairmont did sterling duty as the team car for the Colonial Classic in 1995 - dressed up in Peanut Slab colours, it packed numerous bikes on roof and rack, and half the team in comfort. It was a great colour, had electric everything but sadly, was a Ford. Undoubtedly the choice of car was far more advisable than the choice of workboots with white socks and pants pulled a long way up.

Thirty years on from the Kingswood and Belmont, the current family car is a 2001 Commodore wagon, dusty gold coloured 'Shitbox' model with alloy wheels and only 161,563km on the clock. Living in Melbourne, it's the logical choice for a low-cost vehicle. They make them here. They make the spare parts here. There are a zillion of them on the roads - they are the trabbie of Victoria. Plus the windows wind by hand, a serious novelty for today's generation of children. I can put my bike in the back and double the Commmdore's value!

Truth is, I'm not well acquainted with any of the recent offerings of GM or Ford, nor am I likely to become in the near future - I love the 'BMW 3 series that's been amateurishly stretched in Powerpoint' looks of the VE, but I've never driven one. As I've aged, I find a frightening attraction to the old-man Holdens (Calais - who would name a car after that shit-hole? Hang on, the same guys named one after a hillside suburb in the Hutt Valley...) rather than a horny SS-V8, Maloo or the Monaros, but I'm accepting of aging as natural part of life.

There's probably no question the Ford is better engineered either. They got a handsome tax break from the Victorian government to keep 5 people employed in Geelong designing it, but the nicest thing I can say is that I've mistaken a couple of new Falcons for old Commodores when viewed from a certain 3/4 angle. Can't see the difference when they dress them up for V8 racing, that's for sure.

Anyway, courtesy of the RACV magazine this month, I am thrilled to see Holden once again trounce Ford. With GM billions in debt, only 45 days from Chapter 11, cutting Saab loose last month, and no doubt a few Melbourne accountants staying up at night worrying about whether Holden can survive on its own 4 feet, this is comforting news indeed.

What's more, the discerning car thief also prefers Holden Commodore.

Hold on a minute - that recovery rate seems enormous. It makes me wonder if these so-called car thieves were never actually intending to nick a vehicle - maybe when they went down to Melbourne's new Flexicar pickup spot and discovered a Honda bloody Jazz, they did the natural thing and just took the car next door? Which statistically speaking in this town, was quite likely to be a 1999 - 2004 Commodore.

Doesn't this guy look like he'd prefer a Commodore wagon to you?

Resources for Racing Bike Restorers

Key Resources for Racing Bike Restorers

Most importantly - know someone who was there, in the racing scene at the time of your bike - even if you weren't (thanks Dave!).


Here's a few websites that saved me over the various projects I have done (and made me the happy child that Bianchi promised in their 1950 catalog):

1.Campy only: the website to end all websites for Campy snobs like me. Full timelines of components (critical to getting a build right), opinionated writing about the joys of pasta over rice.

2. eBay USA - a thriving vintage bike trading community exists on eBay, although the bidding is global and rare items can go stratospheric. Don't be afraid of freight, just think it through and talk to the seller before you win - that said, getting a whole bike out of the USA is a feckin' nightmare unless you know someone like Trevor Rice, wh might find you a nice consolidation deal. I had an amazing experience with the vendor of the gold rims on my Bianchi - they eventually came from Paris to NZ twice after a Post Office screwup that occurred not 40 metres from my desk.

Be warned - you can spend hundreds of hours trawling, watching and bidding on parts. Best to have a group of you interested or undertaking restoration projects at the same time, so when the inevitable pressure comes on the load is shared.

3. TradeMe NZ - populated by some savvy people who know the value of second hand treasure, but an occasional source of gold. I had to rat a whole Ciocc to get the levers (factory drilled Super Record) for the Bianchi.

4. Bulgier.net - one of those rare little goldmines of content about bikes, components and racing. Here I found the exact catalog from 1979-80 of the bike I was working on. I nearly wept with joy.


5. Various Vintage Mad-assed Collectors - they are out there, and often have amazing websites like this one in Japan. That's who you are competing with on eBay. Here's an amazing archive of bikes at The Racing Bicycle, and another amazing collection by Ray Dobbins.

6. Classic Rendevous - a well known site for collectors, and a good place to see what is proper and appropriate restoration. You can go too far. Or can you?

7. Shimano Group Overview: I realise it's the devil's own spawn but should you need to check the correctness of some parts from the dark side, you can't beat this site. I have vintage 8 speed Shimano on my Eddie Merckx, which was tougher to get right than Super Record or 50th Anniversary.

8. Continental Components: obscure parts for vintage builds.

9. Yellowjersey.org: stockists of the restorer's gold - NOS or new old stock. I got various bolts and adjusters here that were proving impossible elsewhere.

10. Other blogs: more and more people are starting to write about their passions on the web. Here's a good one called Bottom Bracket - a million subjects but a lot of vintage bike stuff recorded for us to enjoy.

And above all else:

An enthusiastic LBS (local bike shop): young Daniel at Burkes in Wellington (let alone proprietor Peter Burke!) tolerated my dragging into the workshop and boring him senseless over some tiny jewel of a part which moved the project along all of 1%, but had taken months to find in new old stock. Also having the magic of people like Ross Bee (sadly no longer with us - lost his life in a bike race in 2008) who lavished more hand-crafted care on the paint jobs of my bikes than you would believe possible. Doug, Oli (at Roadworks), Antosh, you crazy bastards you're all out there and we thank you.