Bikes I love: Benotto Modelo 3000 c1980

Between 2004 and 2007, the gang at R+R in Wellington NZ undertook a variety of vintage racing bike renovation projects.

The full story of the history of this Benotto will be told by Robbo at some stage, but needless to say it is a beautiful thing. To be accurate, they are beautiful things. In the end two bikes were completed - when in true Murphy's Law sense, after a year of searching the globe 2 came up in succession on eBay - one in Minnesota and one in California.

Robbo's intent was to rebuild a bike dear to him from the early 1980s in Europe - with his original Campagnolo 50th anniversary groupset, one of the few that must have actually ever been raced (as opposed to locked away in a cupboard to admire from time to time).

Having taken so much guidance on what was authentic on my restoration of a 1979 Bianchi, we knew the result with the Benotto would be spectacular. After securing the bikes back to NZ (most of the parts from which were set aside, as they'd been modified over the intervening decades), the hunt was on for NOS (new old stock) components to fill the gaps.

One of the most interesting was the Benotto handlebar tape. I took up cycling later in the 1980s when this horrible stuff had been surpassed by gaudy padded cork tapes, and never had to endure gripping the cold slippery, hard as nails stuff.

Some evil petrochemicals must lurk in the recipe for this tape as the package arrived in the mail with the colour unfaded after 25 years on the shelf.

New decals were prepared by Photoshop guru Brent Backhouse from scratch, the frame painted by the late Ross Bee (after much debate on the precise colour - Dave was pretty sure Ross had some left over in his garage from a respray of the original bike!) and suitable rims obtained for the hubs. A missing front hub from the 50th anniversary set took 9 months to find on the web.

All in all, I suspect Signor Giacinto Benotto would be as proud of the result as he is showing the world the Benotto 3000 Tour of Italy special edition on this advertisement. Bella!

Vintage Cycling Postcards - 1958 Corriere dello Sport

Corriere dello Sport was a main Italian sporting newspaper, and this card promotes the 1958 motorcycle and bicycle show. I've seen this card on eBay for up to 40 euros, I got it in the same batch as the Bartali and Coppi cards in 1994.

On the reverse it has a lovely stamp and postmark.

Vintage Cycling Postcards - Totosport 38th Giro D'Italia

This card is from the 1955 Giro, won by Fiorenzi Magni for the 3rd time. The card promotes Totosport, the Italian betting agency.

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Gino Bartali with Giordani Bike

Another in my postcard collection from that trip to the Giro d'Italia in the 1990s.

The rivalry between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi is well documented on Wikipedia, so I won't attempt to add to the existing catalog of observation and opinion on the subject. Gino was a legend in his own right, even without the rivalry that stopped a nation.

Personally blessed by 3 popes, and known as Gino the Pious, he died at the grand age of 85 in 2000 after open heart surgery .

Like all postcards, I struggle to guess if it's a fake or real. Finding it in an Italian flea-market in 1994 gives me some confidence it's not a digital print, as technology was not that great then. Nor had the internet made a global market for cycling memorabilia.

I found one the same recently on eBay in Italy for 15 euros that looks pretty similar, though the signature has some interesting variations and the picture has a pure black and white treatment where mine has a blue tone. You decide which is real!

Product Review: Suunto T1 Heart Rate Monitor

Suunto - Finnish for 'Disappointment'?

After my little heart problem in 2008, I decided to return to the Heart Rate Monitor market after several years in absentia, years spent muttering like a crazy person about pathetic battery life, interference issues, fragile chest straps and repeated disappointment.

In the 1990s, most bike shops were pretty reluctant to sell them, as they delivered way too many opportunities to test out the warranty service of the manufacturers.

The actual NEED to have a new gadget was too much of an opportunity to miss in life. The main result of my 5+ hours of internet research was the conclusion I really wanted a Power Meter of some kind instead. At several thousand dollars I was able to resist that temptation with ease.

My friend Glen has been a Polar stalwart for many years, valuing the data functions, the big watches, and the software for his PC. He was not loving the need to send them away to get batteries changed, which seemed bizarre in this day and age. Nor was he loving the data loss every time we rode under the power lines outside the Scienceworks museum on our Altona rides, but he'd worked out how to join 2 broken training sessions again on the computer.

I just couldn't get my head around their range of products. The ideally featured Polar HRM (for me) came as a bike computer, not a watch. I don't like a big hulking bike computer, I prefer my little minimalist unit. And I wanted something to wear in the gym.

Not to mention there was no way I was paying THAT much for an HRM!

With plenty of time on my hands recovering from open heart surgery, I finally concluded that the new Suunto range of HRMs, provided they lived up to the other products developed and sold by Suunto (avionics included), were a fine-looking, 12 month warrantied, and well featured product for a great price.

So, to cut a long review short, I'm here to tell you they're rubbish.


The critical flaw is the plastic watch face, and the lack of a protective bezel. Within weeks this watch becomes unreadable in normal use. It's not something you think about, how much you bump your watch. Now I know why the Japanese watches with plastic faces have such monstrous surrounds (think G-Shock). And why expensive watches have glass faces.


The flaw that actually killed by T1 was the screws in the back coming loose in Month 13 of ownership (I lost 2 before it became obvious) rendering it open to the elements, and subsequently ... dead.

Desperate to keep the standout cool factor of the Suunto range, I went back to the catalogue to find the unit that would overcome these problems - surely the really expensive ones had glass faces? Nope - 100% plastic across the range. Disappointment, thy name is Suunto.

Review Score:

Function: 7/10. While it held together (for 13 months), it proved to be an easily understood HRM. Unreadable, but easily understood. Battery life acceptable, and ability to change batteries in the watch and chest strap yourself highly prized.

Form: 2/10. Despite looking very cool in the box, life in the real world overwhelmed the Suunto - the plastic face became decrepit in no time, and then the screws that held the back in came out, rendering it ... dead.

Price: 3/10. Part of the reason for buying was the low price. I could buy 2 for the price of a Polar or similar unit in a mainstream brand. Then again, I would have to buy 2 (or in fact 3-4) if they have this lifespan.

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.

Bikes I love: Fausto Coppi Lugano 53 c1995

The Fausto Coppi, awaiting a better future than commuting and life as a loaner

This beautiful Columbus Genius steel frame came to me while working at R+R in Wellington in 2006 - at 58cm just slightly too small for me, and somewhat oversize for Dave in this new world of compact frames, where like most people he had downsized from 58-59 in his youth to riding 55-56's. With a 140mm stem it would work fine for me. Sort of a compact for a clydesdale.

The Fausto Coppi name was never directly associated with a genuine Fausto-led bike-making endeavour, in the same vein as Eddy Merckx, Ernesto Colnago, Eduardo Bianchi et al. After his death, his family eventually sold the rights to the name to Maschiaghi, an Italian industrial conglomerate who made bikes among other things.

So the story goes, Maschiagi sought out a great Italian frame-maker to help build the first range of bikes. An elderly engineer who had been crafting Ciocc's frames from the 1970s was contacted, and he agreed to come over to Maschiaghi to build something worthy of the name Coppi.

Being a steel-craftsman, the first frames were inevitably lugged steel. However, on this frame only the bottom bracket has a lug (and it's a beauty) - the rest of the bike is welded and hand-filed back to seamless joins.

The Lugano 53 model name refers to his win in the world champs in 1953, held that year in Lugano, Switzerland (see my signed postcard here).

The bikes, or a model remarkably similar to this one were used by the Italian race team Polti in the first half of the 1990s - seen in this photo.


It wasn't long before the bikes that the Coppi bikes took a huge leap forward - creating what is probably the most famous range in the history of the brand. The bright yellow, fat-tubed aluminium racers piloted by Polti from about 1997 were a brute of a bike in terms of power and stiffness, and became tremendous objects of rider desire - steel was largely forgotten.

For everything Polti, check out this amazing website.

The frame sat in the office for some months as the debate raged as to how to fit it out. There were higher priority restorations under way, so a quick-fix with parts from the cupboard and a modern Campagnolo 9-speed Mirage group set for all of $160 from Ribble got things under way.

The first few tests of the new bike left me white-faced and white-knuckled - descending Mount Victoria with a flexy ITM 140mm chrome quill (state of the art for 1994!) and the tyre rubbing on the downtube under brakes. Bring me my brown bib-shorts!

Solving these problems unleashed aesthetic hell upon the Coppi as can be seen in its current photo. Donated, but at least 1990s vintage carbon forks solved the flex (gorgeous but useless triangular profile steel forks filed for future reference), however a short-cut steerer meant a flipped over Ritchey aheadset stem. Ugh!

It remains in the collection for wet commutes, the visiting cyclist, and as a small tribute to the second greatest cyclist who ever lived. In its finest outing to date around the mountains of Dandenong, I secretly suspect Dave started to wonder if a move back to a 58cm frame might possibly be in order again one day.

Bikes I Love: 1930 BSA Racer

A friend returned from the antique store in Devonport in Auckland wondering aloud why a company would build a bike in the 1990s with wooden wheels. An hour later there was a new bike in the family. Platinum plated frame (before chrome plating was possible), cane rims and last ridden in the 1930s this bike bleeds passion for cycling. It originated in Christchurch, and was sold at auction in a household lot in 1995. I like to imagine a tragic tale of a young kiwi officer from a wealthy Canterbury family, so passionate for racing he had his bike completely platinum plated, putting it away in the summer of 1939 as he answered the call of the Empire, only to be cut down in fierce action on Crete and the bike stored away in sorrow for the next 50 years. Wherever that young man may be, the BSA’s in good hands today.

Bikes I Love: Bianchi Rekord 1979

The cheapest bike in the Dalton fleet by far – costing slightly more than one of Backie’s race tyres ($275) on TradeMe in NZ. Indulged over a twelve month period with 100 hours of searching for parts and information around the world on vintage bike sites, eBay and Trademe, plus a handcrafted paintwork restoration by the best in the business.

For all intents and purposes, it’s a new bike – most of the parts came in boxes older than some of the staff at R+R. And at a modest hourly chargeout rate, quite possibly the most expensive bike in the fleet.

And we won't even count the Creative Director's time spent researching the correctness of vintage parts and stickers for the build...


The Back Story to This Bike

It was the year America went to the movies and saw an amazing film – Breaking Away. The story of four friends finishing high school in Midwest USA in the 1970s, one of whom has an inexplicable passion for cycling Italian style. When the heroic Italian Cinzano team visit the region for a race, Stoller is forced to face down the demons of parental expectations, community intolerance of anything outside the norm and just growing up. But, like most of us, he turns out to be crappily average on the bike. But not so crap that he and his misfit buddies can’t enjoy the sweet taste of winning in their own world.

Bruce Springsteen must have been watching the movie when he wrote ‘The River’ a year later. No bikes in that song though.

Generations of young people like me identified with the movie’s vibe. The youthful rebellion, the inevitability of repeating our parent’s lives, taking a win where you can. And lusting after Italian bikes like the Masi Dave Stoller rode, Olmo and Bianchi. It was my second to last year of high school, and I now knew what cool looked like. It would be as long time before I had it.

Restored across 12 months in 2005 and 2006, the original frame was found languishing on TradeMe in NZ as a complete bike, one listing away from being sent to the Salvation Army by the guy’s wife. He’d been to America with his family in 1979, was mad about cycling and had saved up for years to buy something European and cool.


The so called ‘Auckland’ listing turned out to be in Albany, creating a logistics nightmare for recovering the bike. Eventually picked up by Andrew Venter and dropped off in Auckland for collection later. Upgrades over 25 years of using the bike for commuting meant not much was salvageable. Condition would be best described as worn. Only a mother could love it would be more precise.

The ragged condition made the decision about the restoration easy. It was so bad that there was little point in leaving it ‘original’.

In the 1990s I had sourced some random old Campy Super Record parts (pedals with ti spindles, 26.8mm seat post – no idea why other than they were beautiful) and these became the seeds of the rebuild.

To cut the costs of production, Bianchi took a single frame and made several bikes by fitting cheaper or more expensive parts. The remnants of mine were a bunch of Fiamme, Campagnolo, and Bianchi branded parts.

Combing the internet, I found gold – the original catalogue of models from that year from the USA, posted online by some kind hearted Bianchista.

Bikes I Love: Merckx Motorola 1991

Shimano Dura Ace 8 speed with old school hoods and brakes, rare Shimano aero seat post and the a freewheel tick that would embarrass any Campagnolo of its era. This bike is put together as homage to the American invasion of Euro cycling before the Armstrong era.

Motorola grew out of the 7-11 team, pioneers in Europe for whom Andy Hampsten won the Giro in 1988.

Knocked together quickly to take advantage of the frame (dodgy vintage shifters, wheels ok but laced badly), it is not very consistent or authentic, but is built with Sean Yates in mind - he spurned the new STI levers in favour of downtube shifters.

Stem, seat, brakes, frame, grouppo, blue cables, even bottle cages are right. So's the computer, picked from Glen's amazing spare parts cupboard of that era. The bikes were only labeled Merckx for a short period, after which their bike sponsor was Caloi - the team just repainted the Merckx frames with the new name.

A genuine Lance Armstrong Caloi Merckx in these team colours was once on eBay - allegedly raced in Paris-Nice in 1995. Oh how I wish...

Bikes I Love: Merckx MX Leader 1998

The bike of champions made by the greatest champion himself. Bright orange, with lairy pink and yellow championship bands, retrofitted with authentic Campagnolo Record components from the era.

The same frame took a youthful Lance Armstrong to a world championship on the road. Brutally heavy, and in a world of carbon fibre, titanium and magnesium, this bike records the last time steel was used in anger to win anything.

The frame weighs three times a Bianchi FG Lite, but rumours that Nigel weighs three times Brent have been reliably scotched.