Mining for Old

摘要

When a vintage-bike nut manages to find that one NOS part still in its original box, the radiant newness and rarity of such a thing causes a sort of joyous ache in his machine-loving soul. Here is this rare thing, some part of an ancient mechanism that's never been used, has no wear, square edges are still square, pivots are smooth, surfaces unmarred. That ache, take it and amplify it a thousand times as you first walk into the Portland warehouse where Mike Reilly and Greg Hult store many of the parts and bikes mined from the Cycle Hub shop on Sandy Blvd., an old-time British bike shop in an old part of town. After four decades in business, amassing parts stocks, buying out old dealers and, most important, purchasing the remaining spares inventories as each of the major surviving British makers-Norton, Triumph and BSA-failed in the 1970s, Cycle Hub owner Cliff Majhor finally sold out his entire stock. No one involved will give you a dollar figure, but it is definitely in the millions.