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#17843 Sat Aug 18 2007 06:43 PM
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OK...I lied...another statement. BBQ says that whe you find something from King Tut's tomb you leave it alone. Actually, after the national tour of the original artifacts they "REPRODUCED" most of the relics, including his chariot and sent them out on another national tour as the origianls were returned to Egypt. The national tour of the "repros" sells out where ever it goes.

Getting ebay to change is a goodidea, but will be difficult, but still worthy notion. We need to enlist all of the diferent antique associations to push them and to perhaps get your congressman to push for legislation to get ebay to improve its service. They will hide behind their "venue only" shield. Also, ebay is not totally to blame. Difficult for them to authenticate every item that goes on ebay. Heck, I was at a car show and saw some reproductions sold as real items. I informed the show owner and was told to "f*** off." We also need to push congress to work on fraud laws on reproductions as imports and should require them to be clearly marked. Someone clever will come along and find a way around it.

As far as pump parts, keep making them. If trim pieces and face plates, etc are needed to restore them. Keep making them.

But, let's keep doing our part to stop the guys who are selling repros as originals.


Alex
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#17844 Sat Aug 18 2007 09:58 PM
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Here is an interesting perspective on this very topic from the public television show "Antiques Roadshow":

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And if that's true, it could be said the road connecting reproductions and fakes is usually paved with bad ones — or at least intentions worth keeping an eye on.

ANTIQUES ROADSHOW appraiser J. Michael Flanigan, an antiques dealer in Baltimore, Maryland, defines a fake as "any object made or sold with the intent to deceive a buyer." A reproduction is a copy of an original, advertised as a copy. And the phrase, "intent to deceive" is the key difference between that and an object that is flat-out fake.

To make his point, Michael plucked an analogy from Hollywood, a place alleged to be teaming with illusion, if not deception. "If I cloned Harrison Ford and told everyone that he was made up to look like the famous actor, that would be a darn good reproduction," Michael explains. "But if I implied that my clone actually was the real Harrison Ford, and he tried to use that deception to land a plum role in a new movie, well, in our business, we'd call him a fake." Michael sums up: "A fake isn't necessarily in the making. It's in the representation."

A famous example in the real world involved a chair that is currently held by the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. A collector bought the chair for a hefty sum as an original Windsor chair from early American history. Well, expert eyes cast doubts on its authenticity, and the buyer took the seller of the chair to court. Linda Eaton, curator of textiles at the Winterthur Museum, says that the piece was made in the shops of Wallace Nutting, a promoter of Colonial furniture in the early 20th century who oversaw the construction of fine reproductions sold as reproductions. Sometime after the piece was made, someone artificially aged the piece, erased Nutting's mark, and made a few more alterations while traveling that road from the land of reproductions to the home of the fake. "Nutting didn't intend the object as a fake when it was made," Michael says. "But somebody else did later."

The seller in the case pleaded ignorance and was found not guilty, in large part because experts disagreed on the chair's authenticity. The owner donated the unwanted chair to Winterthur, which displayed the chair in its Furniture Study Gallery next to the same unadulterated Nutting chair.

Whoever tried to turn back the clock on that Windsor reproduction was engaged in a new trend — that of improvising fakes rather than making them from scratch. "Now you see legitimate pieces that have been 'tarted up,'" Michael says. A leg of a fine chair will get subtly re-cut to make it finer, or an inlay might be dropped to improve a piece's class. "It's a shortcut to fakery," Michael says. "And time saved is money earned in that shady business."

While fakes are the devil every buyer wants to avoid in the antiques and collectibles business, many consumers face a greater danger: object illiteracy. "One guy used to say, 'There's more deception by ignorance than by intention,' Michael recalls. He's referring to sellers who make assertions about a piece ("It looks like a Renaissance table to me ... ") without truly knowing what the object actually is.

The solution, according to Michael: "You just have to stay away from sellers who make claims they can't back up. If they won't guarantee a piece, you should go down the street and find someone who will."


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#17845 Sun Aug 19 2007 06:49 AM
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The end of Chad's post says a mouthful...buying the item from someone who will guarantee it. See, an overzealousness to get a 'steal of a deal' has played at least a minor role in the rise of this game of deception. We are all trying to find that item that is worth $1000 priced at $250. For example, I found a Firestone Tires flange sign on ebay one time that was seemingly only bid to about 1/3 of it's value. I quickly realized that it was listed in an odd category and I theorized taht I had uncovered a 'hidden gem' that none of the rest of you had noticed. I ended up paying $490 for a sign that is worth $1200-$1500 if real, only to realize upon picking it up that it was in fact a nice, $100 reproduction that had been shot a few times with a pellet gun. Had I not been so quick to pull the trigger and really thought things thru, I would've realized that there are like 30 million US ebayers and that the chances of finding an item that EVERYBODY had let slip thru cracks were fairly slim. Of course, every once in awhile, you'll see something with a BUY IT NOW that has been on only 30 minutes and you buy it cheap, but I digress. What I'm trying to say, is that our own inability to level or reason with ourselves when presented with a "too good to be true" scenario is partly fueling the business of these guys.

Look, we are living in the information age. People are completely aware that finding the value of their item is simply a mouse-click away. The days of going out and finding a Minuteman sign in about #8.5 conditin for $500 are pretty much over. Sure, there will be isolated instances, but it will be like winning the Powerball: we'll hear about it, but it won't happen to us. Ebay has created an artificial feeling of the 'hunt', but it's not like that at all. Chances are, when you see a sign on there, 1000 others saw it before you did and didn't bid. Why didn't they bid?? I'm not advocating becoming sheep that follow each other around and can't think for themselves, but you have to realize that if it seems too good too be true, then there's a 95% chance that it is.

My short-term solution is to buy things from guys that you know personally and that will give you a money-back guarantee. The problems with that are two-fold and should be addressed though. A)We don't like to buy things from guys we know will guarantee them because generally, they are fully aware of what they have and are asking retail. B)Buyers can use the "original or your money back" guarantee to soothe Buyer's Remorse.

My solution for A) would be to simply say, if you can't afford to buy the guaranteed piece, wait till you can. I'd rather save up a $1000 to buy a real sign, then spend $500 on a $18 fake. My solution for B) would be for sellers to have their guarantee in writing with parameters for the refund. I mean, how do you go about proving that something you bought is fake?? If I were crafting a written guarantee, I would simply state that if the buyer believes the sign to be fake, then buyer & seller would send the piece to 3 pre-agreed upon dealers, collectors, experts, authorities, etc. I'd pick one, the buyer would pick one, and then we would mutually agree on one. Then, if 2 of the 3 voted fake then a refund would be given. If 2 of the 3 voted real, no refund would be given.

I realize there are probably many flaws in that, but it's what I'm going to try and do from now on with my auction. I generally will say, money back on an item if it turns out to be fake. I end up refunding a low-end piece or two that I overlooked or was outright fooled by. Most times, it's so obvious that I feel stupid and hand them money. Sometimes though, I get a guy who went overboard and paid too much for something obviously original who wants to invoke the guarantee by saying, "my buddies told me it was fake".

#17846 Sun Aug 19 2007 07:36 AM
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Boy....5 pages of controversy and no one has called anyone a big fat poopy head....


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#17847 Sun Aug 19 2007 11:25 AM
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I haven't posted yet...LOL

#17848 Sun Aug 19 2007 06:15 PM
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I haven't been around my computer for awhile, and it literally took me an hour to read this one thread.

BBQ is in a pi55ing contest from what I can tell.

They DO have thier place....

When I 10 years old (28 now) and my father and I first started collecting, it wasn't to long before he got his first original globe. Nothing fancy, just a Sinclair Dino capco body. But for your first globe I'm sure that my dad was just as thrilled as I was, if not more. Of course, I wanted one just as bad as he did, if not worse. And I did get my first globe. A reproduction Sky Chief globe. At this point of my life at the age 10 or 11, if I had a choice of a $1000 or that REPRO globe, I would have took the globe. A $59.00 globe made me the happiest kid in the bussiness.

Point being, whether that globe was a $100 or $1000 globe, I enjoyed it more than any other thing that I had bought prevoius to that. I still have Repro globe that I display, and I'm perfectly content with that.

I hate to say it, but we are all responsible for these signs being made. If some of us, some of our fathers and grandfathers didn't destroy these items in the past, we wouldn't be making reproductions. As we all know, things are more sought after than others, and those things are usually the things getting reproed. I'm sure we have all at one time have been taken by someone, but how many $15-$50 gas pumps, signs, cans have we bought. Making fake signs is obviously how some people make a living and I have to respect that. As long as they are not trying to fool people, they are working hard at making someone else happy.

#17849 Sun Aug 19 2007 06:47 PM
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WOW! All I was doing was giving you guys a heads up. 5 pages of feed back WOW!

[This message has been edited by mobil100 (edited 08-19-2007).]

#17850 Mon Aug 20 2007 10:11 AM
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One of the best stories was years ago John Denver turned up at a John Denver look- alike contest, and LOST. They refused to believe who he was until he proved it. He got a big kick out of it all pretty good natured guy.

#17851 Mon Aug 20 2007 10:17 AM
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Well, enough is enough, I think it's time I said whats been on my mind watching all this unfold. Joe Yokum is a Big Fat Poopy Head LOL! You do build one helluva a clock mech though!


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#17852 Mon Aug 20 2007 01:11 PM
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John Denver Rules !!!!! I love some John Denver. "Grandmas feather bed"!!!!!! We always would play, and sing that, and sing that, when we went to the Blue Ridge Mountains on family vacations. "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "Rocky Mountain High", "Sunshine on my shoulders", all those.......... Awesome!

#17853 Mon Aug 20 2007 03:29 PM
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Aw..c'mon ....my head isn't THAT big.
Is it???.....and that is dirt around it not poop! SO THERE!!!


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#17854 Mon Aug 20 2007 04:42 PM
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Hey BBQ..... I am suuming you only went to his concerts and don't listen to him on tape or CD. Reason I ask is that a CD would be a "reproduction" of his singing and we know how you feel about reproductions. I hope you have a good sense of humor as I am just kidding. (LOL)

Alex

[This message has been edited by Alex (edited 08-20-2007).]


Alex
Looking for Texaco and Power Gasoline items
#17855 Mon Aug 20 2007 07:31 PM
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Just a thought...the words we read on this post are merely 'reproductions', since the original pixels used to create the post are gone once we post to the board...does that make our posts INVALID?

------------------
Robert Usrey


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#17856 Mon Aug 20 2007 07:35 PM
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Only IF you EDIT YOUR REPLY ! LOL
db

#17857 Mon Aug 20 2007 07:47 PM
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Ok..the mother of all questions:
BBQ...do you still like to practice reproduction???


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