swee'pea99 said:
I had a Benotto for a while. Lovely bike. Nothing fancy - it wasn't Columbus or anything, not marked as anything in particular, and it was no lightweight, but it was a lovely thing to ride - and looked dead cool for a bonus.
My bike was the full Columbus triple-butted affair. It was in a sort of gold colour. Although I loved the groupset it had its quirks. Instead of a regular 600 stem & seat post it had 600 aero. That stuff looked great but the stem quickly lost its angled cap for adjustment (blu-tac to the rescue) and more severely the seat post had an aero profile for the top two-thirds. I wasn't quite tall enough to raise it enough so that the profiled part was fully exposed and so water could collect around the top & seep through into the seat tube and then down to the bottom bracket. Couple that with the heart-shaped cutout underneath the bottom bracket & it was a recipe for disaster. Shimano equipped the BB with a plastic sleeve for such purposes but Japanese & Italian crafts men used different rulers, or something. I must've replaced the BB two or three times at least.
Still a fabulous bike though. Very comfortable and very fast. Then I left school, discovered cars, girls & fags. The rest is history.
I should do a write-up on the Flying Scot I owned. That was a beautiful bike too.