Recently a TricycleFetish.com visitor sent us this picture of an old sulky type tricycle that he was looking to restore. Unsure of exact age, maker, origins, etc. Still a neat example.
Q: I believe this is the authentic model of the horse/stallion/tricycle. Every indication is that there is some age involved. Since you cannot give me an idea of value, can you tell me if there is a market for this item and what the best way to sell it would be?
A: After looking at your photo for about 2 seconds, I am 100% sure that your tricycle is a reproduction. You need to see our page on Fake Horse Tricycles and compare the info and photos on there to the ones on our Authentic Horse Tricycles page….after doing so, it should be obvious why yours is not antique.
…but in case you still can’t see, I will provide a quick list of things that obviously make yours not an antique.
1. Wear – the wear on your tricycle is obviously stages. Why would there be chunks missing from the paint all over the thing, but not where it would be repeatedly worn from normal use?
2. Pedal – no antique tricycle used cheap plain pedals like that made of basically flat steel bars bent into a rectangle.
3. Tail – lots of “wear” but still retains a very very long tail, no, that should have fallen out or been pulled out long ago.
4. Wood rims – though there were tricycles with wood outer tread, they are so rare to find surviving today that you might as well assume that they never existed. In contrast, wood outer tread on reproductions is so common that if you have a horse tricycle without wood rims, you have a good shot of having a real antique, just based on that.
5. Forks – no, wrong type of forks, I’ll leave it at that.
6. The fact that you own one – probably the easiest way to tell that your tricycle is a fake (without even looking at it) is that you own one. I would guess that about one out of every questions we get like yours results in us telling the owner that they have an actual antique tricycle…..and most of those are later models from the 1930′s. Almost nobody ever emails with pictures of real antiques. They are rare, and valuable.
So on to your question of ways to market this tricycle. It’s a simple sell, however, you must have absolutely no ethics or morals. If you’re devoid of any conscience at all, you simply put the horse on eBay, in an auction, or at an antique store as if it were really 110 years old. Price it high, but not too high. Then you just wait for a decorator to come along and think that they are buying an antique piece and pay for it, thinking that they are getting a really good deal.
If, however, you have some scruples, you will need to price it lower at any of those same outlets and sell it for what it is…a reproduction tricycle that was artificially aged (badly) and hope someone thinks it would look good in their home.
Don’t feel bad for (I’m guessing) buying it thinking it was real. We get tons of emails just like yours. It shows that the job done in producing and aging the tricycle is sufficient to fool lots of people. Counterfeiters don’t have to fool the experts, just the people who are going to buy their goods, whether it be fake money, sunglasses, Rolex watches, paintings, etc.
Q: Here is what I have and am getting excited about restoring. I have no experience restoring anything other than old cars. I am pretty handy and have all the tools. With cars original low mileage verifiable cars sometimes are worth more than the restored versions. I am wondering if this is the same with these tricycles?
About 6 years ago while out of town I was staying at a hotel and wandered into an live auction of merry go round horses. Some were worth a bundle $20,000 and others (reproductions?) not so much. I was interested in the action and the lovely wood horses so I stuck around long enough to I purchased a old tricycle shown in the pictures above for I think around $200 dollars. I am not looking to make any money from this purchase my current plan is to refinish the tricycle and eventually give it away when one of my Goddaughters when she has a child.
I have a couple of questions I am hoping you can help me with? Any idea of age and who made it? What type of material it is? Is it collectible and can I get new rubber for the wheels and or the foot pedals? All I know for sure is that It has stamped on the side MADE IN ENGLAND. Would you be so kind as to share with me your opinion about how a restoration affects the value or future collectability ? As I said before I will not sell this but I do not want to do something stupid like ruin a good old tricycle. Everything shows some wear paint looks original and there is little rust. There is one cracked wood slat on the seat ( not sure of the wood type looks like a pine?). Everything turns fine and it has a single wheel in the hoof to steer. There are two holes on either side of the horse’s mouth that likely contained reins (leather?) or some kind of bridle.
A: Your question is along the same lines as what we get asked constantly, which is basically….should I restore my old tricycle or leave it like it is. The simple answer is this: Do whatever you want to do.
If you like the old weathered look, leave it as it is. If you would like it to regain its original colors and look like a new toy, then restore it. If you want to paint it neon green with pink polka dots, do that. Whatever you choose should be based on what your intentions are for the tricycle and your personal preferences, and that is because you will never make money restoring a tricycle to resell. The time, effort and monetary costs will always exceed your selling price when you restore a toy tricycle. The only time when I can think of where restoring a tricycle would lead to a profit would be if you were restoring a very early adult tricycle from circa 1870 and the tricycle in question was badly damaged. In that case the restoration might be worth it, but there you are talking about a tricycle worth tens of thousands of dollars.
This is not to say that you can’t increase or decrease the value of your tricycle depending on what you do to it. Just that the restoration process will cost more than what the finished product will gain in value, even if done perfectly. You could spend anywhere from $100 to several thousand dollars restoring this tricycle, yet the increase in value will likely be several hundred dollars at the most, no matter what you spend.
I am unsure of the maker. These types of surrey tricycles are usually hard to put a manufacturer on, and being that it was made in England makes it even harder. It seems as if a lot of these types of trikes were made by a company that specialized in making them, rather than by a large toy maker.
Judging by the photo, I’d say it was made around 1940′s. The horse looks to be made out of cast aluminum, as were many of this style, but it’s hard to tell with just a picture. You can find replacement tires and rubber in our online tricycle store, though I’m unsure of where you can find rubber for the pedals- you may have to improvise a bit there.
Q: I’m looking to get an opinion on my tricycle horse. It has a matching wagon/carrier of some sort. I bought it from a gentleman at an auction who had no idea about the history of the piece. I’m familiar with all the fakes/reproductions that are out there. I do believe this one is fairly old, maybe 40-60 years old, but I’m just not sure.
A: First of all, never trust an auctioneer, and never rely on an auctioneer to tell you anything about a piece that isn’t authentic. If this were an authentic horse velocipede from the period being copied by this one, the auctioneer would have gushed all over the piece and its rarity and antiquity. My guess is the auctioneer said something like “here we have a nice little horse tricycle,” and then started the bidding.
It may sound like I have something against auctioneers, but no, I do not. I regularly attend many auctions and have learned to take what they say with a grain of salt. Also, many many of the questions we get here at TricycleFetish.com concern purchases at auctions. When you combine the mess that is eBay, auction purchases become the majority of questions concerning value and authenticity.
Your specific trike has a few of key things that let you know its a repro. First, the wooden rims. Very, very, very, rare to find authentic antique tricycles (of any kind) with this time of rim. Very, very, very, common to find this type of rim on reproduction tricycles. Secondly, the wheelbase is so tiny (and I’m guessing the overall size is small as well). If you look at a tricycle and can’t figure out how it could be ridden by a child, that’s a clue that it might be a repro. The last easy thing to spot is the paint. It looks too uniform. When you look at enough of these things, its obvious what techniques were used to show age. In reality, a genuine antique tricycle would probably have chips, gouges and flaking paint, in addition to the type of wear that is shown on your paint job.
As for it being a vintage reproduction? I can’t tell for sure, and don’t really have too much knowledge concerning exact ages, but it looks to me that it was made in the past 10-15 years, at the latest. It looks just like a lot of other ones made recently. Also, most horse tricycles made circa mid-century era didn’t really try to be replicas of the antiques, rather they were made as their own type of toys and have characteristic design elements of the 40′s or 50′s or 60′s. This tricycle just looks like an Asian interpretation of what they think an old horse tricycle would look like today.
Be sure to check out our Fake Horse Tricycles page for more info and some photos of other repros. And then check the differences between those and the one on our antique horse trikes page.
Anyone know the maker of this horse sulky type tricycle?
One of the most common questions we receive at Tricyclefetish.com deals with the authenticity and age of horse tricycles. Is my tricycle antique? A simple “NO” in reply to every question would be right about 99.9% of the time without ever seeing a picture of the tricycle. Original horse tricycles are incredibly rare, especially Victorian era horse tricycles and velocipedes. The chance of you finding one is slim, even if you are a high volume antique dealer.
So to help demystify antique vs fake horse trikes, we’ve created two pages with pictures of fake tricycles and antique tricycles, complete with what to look for to help determine if your tricycle is in fact a fake. We recommend that you visit our Fake Horse Tricycles page first and then after you’ve studied it take a look at our Genuine Antique Horse tricycles page. If you still have questions, feel free to email us and we’ll see if we can help.
We recently received an email inquiry about the horse tricycle pictured at the left. There’s a curved glass oak china cupboard in the background, so it’s safe to say that the owner’s bought it because it was an antique, or so they thought.
Part of what makes gaining knowledge about tricycles and collecting them so difficult is the lack of information and the other is scarcity. In over a decade of dealing with tricycles and antiques in general I’ve never personally seen any type of horse tricycle for sale (not an antique one anyway). Not at an auction, not at estate sales, yard sales, barn sales, not from pickers….and I’ve only seen a couple legitimate old ones at antique stores.
Yet every week there are a handful on eBay, most of them obvious fakes that were made within the past ten years. And some are miniature fakes, decorative items only a foot tall or so, but in an eBay listing can be pictured as if they are normal sized.
Every once in awhile, we get photos like the one above. The tricycles have cobwebs and dust on them and sometimes there is a bit of damage. The problem is though, that the tricycle appears to have no wear whatsoever that would be associated with it being 100+ years old. Little dings and breaks don’t count, as they could have occurred days before the photo was taken.
Other issues that I have with the authenticity of the tricycle are the wooden rims, which are even rarer to find than horse tricycles, yet nearly all replicas/fakes/reproductions have the wooden rims. Also the wheels are held on with cotter pins. While cotter pins were used on tricycles in the late 1800′s, using them to hold on wheels is not common, especially on hulky machines like this one. The brown paint looks to have been applied sparingly to give the look of wear, but it is uneven compared to what normal wear would look like, and yet uniform over the entire surface.
If I were to venture a guess, and that’s what it would be without seeing the tricycle in person or at least having better pictures, I would say that this particular horse tricycle was probably a reproduction made in the 1960′s or thereabouts. It could even be much newer and stored in a way to make the dust make it seem older.
For some more insight to some of the ways to tell if your tricycle is a fake, visit our Fakes & Reproductions page.
