So if the owner has serious health issues and is no longer riding...
WHY is he paying to get the bike repaired? I mean if riding is a thing of the past, WHY spend all that money to fix the thing AND repaint it???
Why not just sell the bike, as is, he'll never recover the money he is going to put in to repaint it. Worse case, give it back to the company / sell it back to the shop.
This makes absolutely no sense. Besides, to be honest, who'd want to buy a bike from a company, that for all intensive purposes, never really existed to the public to begin with?
What shop is fixing it? Where are they getting the parts to fix it? Are they new parts or parts yanked off an old prototype from several years ago, repainted to hide the oxidation from sitting in a warehouse for years?
The grapevine of gossip needs some better watering here bro.
Aaron