I snagged this at a garage sale this morning. I bought it because the full 600 brifter group and Columbus tubing sticker made it worth risking $55. The people I bought it from told me that it had been sitting unused outside for about a year. Probably not the best bike storage strategy in Wisconsin—the chain and some of the fasteners were a little rusty—but the frame looked nice and clean. Even the tires are pretty good.
Two odd details. First, it has no decals—not a one—but for the Columbus tubing sticker, which is where things get really odd:
It's Metax. Yeah, I didn't know what it was at first either. I thought this was some low-end tube set and that the bike was maybe something banged out by the thousands in Taiwan. Maybe something from the Performance Bike mail-order catalog (it had Performance-badged bottle cages and a Forté stem). But Metax, as our pal Google tells it, is a stainless tube set.
Stainless really isn't a very popular frame material, so this narrows things down a lot. I know that one local builder was using stainless around the time this bike was probably built, but this bike doesn't seem flamboyant enough to be one of Lawrence's, and I have no idea whether he ever used Metax.
Two things might help a little. First, it has unusual rear dropouts, including a fender boss on the seatstay:
Second, it has a distinctive serial number:
Any guesses?
PS—Sorry folks, but for reasons beyond my control, the Ute review is just going to have to wait.
7 comments:
http://www.tetcycles.com/
Looks like quite a bargain for $55
Jeez Joe, that was quick. Hats off to the Nine Mile Skidder
Jeez, it looks like I'm going to have to leave the west side and start garage sale-ing on your side of town.
Quite the bargain!
Wow! What a find! Looks like some hardcore commuter forgot about his bike somewhere... the people who sold it didn't know much about it?
(second) Joe: You might have better luck over on this side of town, but I think Maple Bluff remains at the top of the heap for good garage sailing.
nathan: You might be right, though the components, which are the same vintage as the Metax, don't appear to be all that worn.
And no, the people selling it didn't know much about it, nor did they seem to know much about bikes in general. They said they were selling it for a friend, which is a pretty common practice in our neighborhood.
wow, I'm jealous...
Thats a serious find!
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