Crazy rental bikes at stow lake, the cruiser one looks pretty comfortable but it's really low to the ground so it's insanely dangerous to ride on the road as you are as tall as the top of a cars wheel. the other bike is pretty cool, as big as a car with lots of lights but the gearing is too hard for even a slight slope up. I wonder how the breaks work on the car bike work, coster or drum brake?

I need to find a bike just like this for my cruiser project so I can put upright handlebars and a comfortable seat on it but all I have been able to find are ones that I'm not crazy about. Then the price is unbelievable 200$ to 400$ for a vintage road bike.

It seems that schwinn has revived one of their classics. The schwinn varsity is being sold at walmart in carbon fiber and aluminum.

This is not the first time I have seen schwinn bring back an old model, they have started building single speed krates and fake balloon tire cruiser bikes. I wonder what vintage classic will come next?

Retro cruiser project!

I need a new project! I have nothing to do bike wise which is never a good thing. I want a black or brown or yellowish raleigh or something similar to that with classic cruiser handlebars and a sprung saddle. I was hoping to make it a 10 with shifters on stem or down tube but if it is a 5 speed I have this old thumb shifter that is really cool. I want to spend about 100$ on the frame and get most of every thing else at the bike kitchen or out of what I have in the garage. I love old schwinn style grips (the ones with finger holds) If I get wheels at the bike kitchen I'll probably need to learn how to true them. As you can see I have a ton of decisions to make and it is still in the drawing board state.

I love vintage schwinn!!!!

Vintage schwinn ads!

Klein rascal

This is a sweet bike, light for its age and super cool looking. It rips up mount tam. I have a pink chris king headset and anodized spacers. the handle bar is a soma late riser track bar with xt breaks and shifters, the grips are oury. It has internal cabling and an aluminum frame. the paint is a green and black fade. the only down side is that the steerer tube is 1" not 1 1/8" which makes finding a shock quite a pain. I got the manatue 3 which is quite good even though it does not have much travel

So this is it, all original down to the tires. Has racing seat, tubular rims, "kool yellow" paint and caliper breaks and schwinn sprint rear derailur.

The only thing to fix is that the break levers are too low in the bars and there is a ton of grime on the bottom bracket.

My schwinn varsity is what I believe to be a 60's model but I'm not sure how to tell. It is all original except for the bar tape (the original was gone when I got it) which I replaced with green cloth tape which looks very good. I fine tuned it so that it shifts with just a tap of the lever. I was having trouble with the rear brake because whenever I adjusted it a day later it would be completely loose again. It turned out that the cable was frayed inside the housing so the spring was not bouncing back. I'll post pics as soon as I can figure out how to get my camera working. :)

here is the omni 10, it does not look so bad in this picture.

A few weeks ago I was walking home from the store, it was dark and rainy and cold, when i saw a sorry looking "huffy omni 10" road bike leaning against a sign. As soon as I saw it I know it was a complete piece of crap, as I wheeled it home (it actually had both wheels!!) I wondered what I was going to do with it, whenever I see a bike on the street I can't leave it because my curiosity gets ahold of me. When I got home to the basement I did a full check, there where: busted plastic shifters, stamped metal deralurs, a riser stem made out of metal folded into a cilender then bent down, foam bar tape, a one piece crank, 26in wheels with odd-ball size tires and a whole lot of corroded or rusted strange parts that did who knows what. Plus a completely bent frame.

p.s. When it was sold the cables where held to the frame with zip ties, can't they leave it up to you to make the bike look crappy by scratching and dinging it up???

Just a garage full,

My fist bike find was a schwinn thrasher, cool frame and look, heavy as hell, followed by a nishiki banana seat that is basicly covered in rust, followed by a no name steel mountain bike from the 80's. After that came a dimond back ascent which is now a fixie, then a sweet klein rascal with vintage xt components and an anodized riser bar, then a schwinn varsity, it is a beautiful bike, got it for free at bike kitchen, has yellow paint and green bar tape, converted 5 speed, 40 lbs!!!! Most of them are street corner finds or dumpster dives, sometimes I wonder if the people who live in my neighborhood think I'm a weirdo because I pull rusty bike shaped objects from their trash!!! I have gotten strange looks while pulling an old mountain bike with one wheel down the sidewalks.