What would you do with these? (late 90s road bike content)

Getting the decorations down from the loft the other day I noticed my two road bikes under the rafters.

One is a Giant CFR2 like this:

It has carbon tubes Mavic Cosmic wheels and 9sp Tiagra groupset

The other is a Fausto Coppi K591 like this:

which is 10sp 105 with some ordinary wheels

Both were OK in their day. Not exactly fireballs but they rode well esp the Coppi.

Worth using them again for ‘spirited’ road rides or would a new road bike be significantly better?

Ta

Swap the wheels and bin the Giant.
Wish I still had my Coppi SL ,it was a really nice ride.

What size is the Giant?
If you wanted to sell I could be interested as looking for a cheap bike for one of the kids.

Keep the coppi, bin the giant.

Ride the Coppi as is, will still ride really well i think.

Singlespeed the Giant for winter/pub duties?

And take the stickers off those Cosmics 🙂

Road Bikes? bikes you can only ride on one type of surface? bin em.

Swap the wheels and bin the Giant.

I was thinking along the same lines

Apart from new tyres/tubes/brake blocks will it need much else after a 15-year layup?

Thanks again

Sell them both and buy a carbon race bike, you’ll be blown away by the difference.

Keep em both. Test ride them, decide which you like best and transfer all the good stuff to that frame, put all the less good stuff on the other one, add some mudguards to it and you have a summer/winter road bike set-up, for basically nothing!

I actually prefer the looks of the giant, but Giant carbon bikes were very high end when I started cycling! I like late 90’s bikes….

Keep the nicest one (the Coppi) and get everything in perfect order and then just use it. Don’t get a carbon race bike, they are probably good but not so widely different. Nothing wrong or difficult about using a ‘retro’ bike all the time. My brother runs a fleet of late 80s peugeots and does just fine, doing club riding year in year out over thousands of miles.

Still a road bike though, so fundamentally less fun than an mtb 🙂

I love my 90’s roadie. Updated the running gear a few years ago and never looked back. Does exactly what I need it to do, and comes in a smidge under 20lb. I’ll probably bimble around on it till my bimbling days are no more.

Nothing wrong with some 90s road niceness. Still rides as nicely as most current road bikes. Unlike MTBs, there hasn’t been a huge leap forward in road bike technology over the last 15 years or so.

If you don’t/wont use them then find them a new home, either by selling them or donating them to a local bike project.

If you are going to, or want to use them then just crack on and ride them, they’ll still ride as well as they ever did and modern stuff is only incrementally better unless you chasing tenths at the front of a race. The only real downside to 90’s bikes is often a lack of tire clearance…

Thanks everyone

They were both mechanically sound when I put them away and I like the idea of making one ‘good’ one out of the two

If anyone has any 56cm/6′ rider road/hybrid bikes they would like to donate to the oab_commuter fund, please feel free. I can pay postage.

Pity the Coppi wasn’t steel as it would have been a Pelizzoli-built frame and likely to become a future classic and worth hanging on to. Not much of a market of 1990s bikes at the moment, too new for the likes of L’eroica. That said, about 10 years ago, 1980s stuff was very cheap to pick up and it now fetches good money, particularly Campagnolo and Italian frames.

I notice that those aren’t the actual bikes, but both are fine rides. The only significant difference in road bike development has been the addition of a few more cogs at the back, the routing of cables under the bars (for Shimano) and the introduction of a more appropriate (for most) compact 50/34 crankset. My favourite saddle is still a Flite Titanium original.

Personally, I’d keep the Giant. The Coppi is a generic aluminium frame, but Giant (and Look) were at the cutting edge of carbon frames in their day. Hence I think for historic reasons, it will be a better bike. Tiagra 9 speed was very good. You can keep it as it is or upgrade to more modern components.