Mystery Colnago For Sale

In 2008 Gary Knight and I started buying bikes off of Italian eBay. I know its common now, and most stuff is listed globally, but at the time it was a fairly new frontier.

American eBay was boring and overpriced and we were more interested in bikes built to stay in Italy as opposed to bikes built for import into the US. EuroMTB addiction could not be satisfied domestically. So we learned some bike Italian, telaio and acciao and sent out a lot of eBay messages in our poor attempt at language-Volete consegnare agli USA ?

Campagnolo was too common in the US and we were more interested in components like Galli, Modolo, Universal and Ofmega. Matt from Bikeville/Via Bikes (Yo Matt) called this particular bike “proletariat” and I think that describes what we were looking for, a common man’s racer.

This Colnago is for sale. Indeterminate Era, $500 complete. Rough patina on close inspection. Galli cranks, brakes and levers. Low end Campag front and rear derailleurs. Campag hubs. Needs some love plus sew-ups and new brake hoods.I’ll measure it today.

Do this bike some justice, it has never been ridden outside of Italy.

(At this point I’d say a lot of Italian eBay is overpriced while American eBay has partially entered back into reality. )