gold

It's not on mine, because mine is fillet-brazed.

Those 72 (seat lug) and 74 (top headlug) stamps are almost certainly not date stamps; they're frame angles. My guess is that the lugs were not manufactured by Lambert, but brought in from a lug manufacturer; an angle marking tells the framebuilder how he needs to miter the tubes to fit together correctly. You see those stamps on a lot of seat/head lugs up until the late 1970s; the seat lug stamps are pretty prominent on a lot of 1960s Bianchis.

My read on that stem bolt is that it's a QR skewer, screwed into the stem wedge - or not screwed into anything at all. That seems like a super-dumb idea; what if you fail to lock the lever down, and it comes free? Or what if you bump your hand against the lever while reaching towards the bar? Your stem+bars start swiveling around in the steerer, and you lose control of the bike.

Perhaps "somebody" (let's not blame the seller without further evidence, no no no) was dismantling things and misplaced the stem bolt, and threw a QR skewer in as a replacement to hold the whole mess together. Personally, I wouldn't ride it until I'd pulled that skewer, pulled the stem and checked to see whether there was actually a stem wedge fixing the cockpit into the steerer. And then I'd replace the missing stem bolt, probably with a normal M6 Allen bolt instead of the 3/16" or 7/32" Allen bolt that was in there originally.

Weinmann brakes are easier to believe; the original quick release hangers are obviously Weinmanns, so Lambert must have had some supply available. Blue cable/brown bar tape - a bad aesthetic combination, but not necessarily out of bounds. A shop might cable it up with whatever housing was appropriate (blue matches the blue toestraps and L stickers on brake bolts/QRs/pedal dustcaps). Tape would likely be customer's choice. White would be consistent with the advertising; although the shellac is very odd for a 70s bike in the US (I suspect it was done post-sale), the color's a reasonable match for the stock suede saddle.

I'm wondering, though: "Never ridden" is not the same thing as "all original". We're talking about what looks to be a bric-a-brac dealer who's been on eBay for four years, and only has a 37 feedback rating. Many of the bike parts they've gotten positive feedback for selling are parts they gave feedback for when they bought them a year or so before. Let's just say that their devotion to original-ness may not match an oldie bike aficionado's standards.

As Cusqueno points out in a BikeForum thread that's one of the seller's cited sources, the perceived value of the gold-plated Lamberts cames from two features: Gold (ooo, shiny!) and rarity, not some particular functional superiority of the bikes themselves. Gold plating won't make a bad frame better. As for rarity, it's hard to know how common these were; all we know is that production estimates and predicted valuation are from one post by some unidentified Internet guy the seller links to, without any cited source for confirmation. The BikeForums thread includes posts from several "ex-dealers" who claim to have them, who post no photos. Without some information from a Lambert employee, we'll probably never know how many gold-plated Lamberts were made.

In any case, anyone who paid $9500 for that particular bike has a screw loose in their head. I'm guessing they offered the seller much less, and the seller grabbed what they could get while they could get it. I've noticed a lot of junk dealers who buy the contents of abandoned storage units and find old bikes in them; they don't know anything about bikes, but they've heard some old bikes command high prices. They do ten minutes of Googling, post it on eBay with a four-figure price, and get all huffy when you question them. At least this might be a case where the seller cleaned the dirt off before taking the photos. But in no known universe should that bike sell for $9500.

OldRoadTehachapi's site links to a scan of an early US Lambert brochure scanned by Mark Bulgier, a retired framebuilder in Seattle (Santana, Rodruiguez&Erickson, Davidson, Ti, Match), who's a member of the Classic Rendezvous (member-only viewing) and iBOB Google groups. The full brochure is here:

www.bulgier.net/pics/bike/Catalogs/lambert/