• If anyone knows much about old Eddy Merckx stuff I’d appreciate a view on this.

    I’m pretty sure it’s fake as I can’t find anything remotely similar online.

    1. The rear dropouts look orange beneath the green suggesting it’s been painted
    2. The yellow and pink stickers are the opposite position to all others online
    3. The front fork appears to be quite relaxed and not like the race geometry on other vintage EM frames
    4. Also the metal work around the head tube doesn’t seem to match with anything else EM.

    The thing that fascinated me though is that if it is a fake, then getting the real decals is pretty good going. It’s also rusty and well weathered suggesting it was faked a number of years ago.

    Maybe it’s just a cheap EM frame set that’s been long forgotten.

    Thanks everyone!

  • That 'Eddy Merckx'

    I seem to remember there were once ('70's/80's) an awful lot of orange EM's about, so the original orange left under the green does suggest it could be an EM. That's in the sense that when it was new it was badged as EM, rather than the sense that it was ever anything like a bike that Eddy himself might have had anything to do with.

    I'd say transfers give a very unreliable guide to the origins of bike kit. I have seen sheets of transfers with all sorts of trade names: Campag, Reynolds 531 etc. I believe these were printed in China and they looked convincing enough to me. So never mind the name, look at the quality!

    I've even come across examples of frames being badged down, that is given labels less prestigious than their true maker. I'm sure I've mentioned here in the past that when I was in the stove enamelling game I refinished and rebadged a whole set of excellent frames as Carrera (i.e. Halford) for a well known pro. My own TT frame came to me badged as a Dayton, but turned out to be far superior to anything they normally made - for one thing it is silver soldered; probably another job done for their pro team.

    As for the Campag chainset above, I think you will find those chain rings are steel - which doesn't suggest high quality.

    Moral: don't be overimpressed by branding.

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