I don't completely agree with the "make them as original as possible"
thought. There are probably at least two reasons for this,
A) I paid $350 for my air cleaner (at the time it seemed like a good deal)
and I hate to see the price drop too far below that in case poverty strikes
and I need to start selling off all my precious belongings to survive. It
happened once before and there is no reason to believe that it couldn't
happen again. An original Tiger air cleaner I could probably do without and
for what it would currently fetch I could cover about half of my mortgage
payment for a month.
This reminds me of an unpleasant thing that happened to me earlier this
year. I bought 16 MB of RAM in January for $325 and now I can buy the same
thing for ~$150.
B) Although it is ridiculous the extent some people take the originality
thing (the Mustang guys do the same chalkmark thing that someone mentioned
the Camaro guys do), I think authentic restoration can be fun. I will
modify some things to "make it better" but in other places I will be quite
anal WRT details. The interior is one place where I think original is
pretty close to best.
I like the restoration side of our hobby and it has its' place in Tigerdom
no matter what some who have been soured to it may think. If you dilute the
market with identical repos it will take some of the fun out of it for those
who care about such things. Why do that? You'd then be as bad as those who
take the fun out by driving the prices of some items (priced an original
wood steering wheel lately?) out of reach for most of us. Make the air
cleaners but do something to distinguish them from the originals. I think a
good way would be to change one of the digits in the big number on the cover.
I'll probably buy one of your repos as a spare if the price is not too high.
Frank Marrone MK I Tiger B9471116
marrone@wco.com 1966 LTD
Series I Alpine (2.3L powered by Ford)
Yamaha Seca 900
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