SpeedofLite 

rustystrings61 

FLASHBACK! Oh man, I remember reading this article when it first came out! In southwestern Virginia in those years, the nearest bike shops were in Roanoke. My friend David had started the little boomlet of cycling in my circle with a Peugeot U08 which he was rapidly outgrowing. Then I cleaned up my department store West German Brownie 10 speed, then Steve kicked off the LeTour binge by purchasing a sky blue example. Lester followed suit with a lemon yellow LeTour, and finally David traded in his now-undersized U08 for a red LeTour. And since there were no more colors to pick in the LeTour line, I went to a different shop in Roanoke and bought a Batavus Tour de l'Europe.

We did the period upgrades as well. We all at some point took our wheels in to Dixon's and had the rims replaced with alloy Weinmanns - I think it was the cost of the rims plus $10. Dave and Steve replaced their stem shifters with downtube levers. I replaced the Simplex Prestige rear derailleur on my Batavus with an early Shimano 600 unit. We rode those bikes all over the Franklin County area, but the pinnacle ride was a three day tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway, going up from Ferrum to Mabry's Mill, then the second day riding to Roanoke Mountain (back when you could camp there!) and then returning home the third day.

All of this is to lead up to recently recovered photos (pictures or it didn't happen, right?) from July, 1976 - my apologies for the image quality, they were taken with a borrowed 110 Kodak and the prints were poorly stored and lost for 30 years -



LeTours as they were meant to be ridden! We're somewhere on the Parkway, with my outlier Batavus in the foreground, David's red bike out of the picture, and Lester hidden by the handlebar bag on his yellow machine, and Steve's blue bike in the background.



David with his red bike; Steve's blue bike right front; my Batavus in between.

I have so many memories of riding with my friends on their LeTours - thank you for the road test!

SpeedofLite 

Thank you for the 110 Kodak photos and great story!
I haven't ridden in that area (yet), but you guys were movin' a lot of weight there!
This just begs for a reunion ride in a few years.

WilliamK1974

This is a great thread. I would like to hear more about the bicycle trip. As much as I liked bikes when I was younger, the notion of taking an overnight bike journey never occurred to me and my friends. Maybe that's because we came of age many years after the bike boom.

uncle uncle

I can't find any official Schwinn printed text (like in a catalog) that says the Le Tour was made with double butted tubing. That said, the Le Tour was the workhorse of the "lite weight" lineup for them. And I still contend that all the Schwinn Approved "branding" was more to hide the fact that the bicycle, parts, everything.. everything was made by someone besides Schwinn.

NothEndReCycle

Absolutely....Interesting!

Metacortex

The '74 catalog page indicated "butted top and bottom tubes", however that was true for only the 21" and 23" frame sizes. The 25" size had straight-gauge tubes. There was more detail in the Oct. '73 Reporter where the bike was first introduced to dealers:

uncle uncle

Good dig Metacortex... I humbly and more knowledgeably stand corrected. Butted high tensile frames are a bit of a unicorn in the bicycle corrals, are they not?