DesmoDog

I worked at a couple Schwinn shops as a mechanic for about ten years in the 70s and 80s, then got my first job after college and became infatuated with a different sort of bike and spent the next 25+ years playing around with those.

For a bunch of years I've thought about putting together an old cruiser style bike along the lines of a Schwinn Typhoon. I wanted to add a Sturmey multi-speed hub, and brakes, cable stays, etc. When I added up the prices it became pretty clear I could buy a new bike cheaper, but... what's the quality like? How good/bad can a new low end "Schwinn" be for a couple hundred bucks?

Long story short a box with a "Schwinn Sanctuary 7" in it showed up at my door today. It's not the ideal starting point, but it has a lot of features I wanted, mainly the right style frame and cable stops. Vertical dropouts make the Sturmey hub problematic but I can live with a derailleur.

Suffice it to say this will be a bit of an experiment. Most of the bad reviews of the bike seem to have been written by people who have no clue how things are supposed to work. I may be fooling myself but I think with some TLC and a few upgrades here and there, it can be a fun bike? I fully expect to modify/upgrade a few things on this but for now I'm going to assemble it pretty much as is and see what I'm starting with.

From what I can tell so far there's no shipping damage. It's been a long time since I've unboxed a bike, but this one seemed to be packed better than what I remember. I had planned on borrowing a service stand to use when assemblng this, but that didn't work out so I'll be putting this together on the floor, kind of a pain but doable.

The first thing I noticed after unboxing it was the headset bearings were tight. I adjusted it but it was still pretty stiff, so I took it apart. It was pretty bare in there, after packing it with real grease it was nice and smooth.

Reviews also mention tires going flat so I pulled off the rear wheel to check it out. It is surprisingly light - I still remember the steel rims and hubs I guess. The axle was pretty tight to so I adjusted that but it didn't help much. I'm not sure what they use for grease but it's thick and stiff. I haven't got the tool to pull the cluster off the hub so I just pulled the axle but left the bearings in place and tried to get some decent grease on everything. It improved but there's a bad bearing or dirt or something, the axle catches once in a while when the wheel spins. I'm not sure what I'll be doing with the wheels yet so I'm going to run with it for now. I took the tire off and the rim strip is fine. Sounds like it's not uncommon to find one out of place though. The rim seems pretty true too. I haven't put it in a stand yet, I ran out of time.

The front wheel hasn't been installed, I tried to spin the axle and it's so tight I can't spin it by hand. That'll get rebuilt too!

And that's it for tonight. So far I think the bike is going to work out fine, albeit with more work than a simple assembly.