Originally Posted by
Catnap
I was at Kutztown on Saturday from around 9:30am until 3pm. My friends and I stopped at Trexlertown first, only to find three vendors and no buyers. Having never attended a swap outside of NYC, I was pretty worried until we rolled into the Kutztown campground and saw a full parking lot and many vendors.
From an inventory perspective, Kutztown was 70% Schwinns & American muscle bikes / balloon tire bikes and about 30% 1960s-1990s road stuff. There were only three vendors (including myself) who sold exclusively road and track stuff; a few others had a mix of things with road & track parts in their bins if you took the time to look. Overall, the vibe was great - very friendly and welcoming from the moment I drove up. Good food at very reasonable prices (I had breakfast and lunch for about $10 total). I'd say the only downside was very few buyers who weren't also vendors. There just wasn't a lot of foot traffic, which made sense since the venue is pretty far out in a lovely campground. Casual cyclists aren't going to stumble onto it the way say, the Brooklyn Bike Jumble usually has all kinds of random people. I did enough in sales to justify the trip, and had a lot of fun conversations with the other vendors. There were a lot of good deals and finds to be had as well. I would have bought a lot more stuff but I'm trying to be as disciplined as possible about selling and not buying. I did score a titanium bottom bracket and a Shimano 7400 NJS track bottom bracket for $40 total, and each is worth several times that amount.
There was a lot of scuttlebutt going around regarding the two competing swaps. As an outsider / first timer, my observation was that I hope the two groups can work things out ahead of next year, as keeping it to one venue in a more accessible place would be to everyone's benefit. Kutztown had all the action, but after over a decade hearing about the Trexlertown swap, I can't help but think there might have been a larger buying crowd if there weren't competing swaps on the same day.
That's a great writeup and I'm glad you enjoyed the swap at Kutztown. It's one of the most laid back, relaxing swaps I ever attended. 180 degrees from the fast movers like Westminster and Brooklyn. It should be back in the fall, sometime around mid-September. If all goes well, Trexlertown should be the first weekend in October. They like to coordinate that one in between the big car shows at Carlisle and Hershey and they also want to do it the same weekend as Velofest which usually falls on the same weekend. I'm just going to call this a "hiccup" that the two spring shows fell on the same dates this year and leave it at that.
