Kommisar89

It's one thing to look back on Schwinn now with 20/20 hindsight but I remember my thoughts on Schwinn in the early 70's as well. Most of us then had department store bikes probably made by the likes of Huffy, Murray, Columbia, etc. They weighed 40+ pounds, had welded contruction, and Japanese components. The "good" bikes of the day, which meant entry level Raleighs and various French and Italian brands, weighed 28-lbs, had lugged construction and had European components. My friend with the more well to do parents got a new Varsity as I'm sure his parents thought Schwinn was the only worthwhile brand. It sure looked to me a lot more like those department store bikes than the European ones. We weren't sophisticated enough to know the difference between regular welding and flash welding and didn't know about fillet brazing but we could sure see the difference between lugs and no lugs. And we could feel the difference between 28-lbs and 40-lbs. And the Schwinns had the same crappy one piece Ashtabula cranks as the department store bikes. And the "better" model Schwinns were imported from Japan! Japan!!! That was like saying China in 1972! It's where they made cheap plastic toys, Godzilla movies, and cheezy little cars with names like Datsun and Toyota. Yeah, Schwinn definately got a stigma attached even back then. Of course then we had no way of knowing that in 5 years Japanese bikes would be the shizzle at the entry level and mid-range or that cottered cranks and Simplex derailleurs would be as passe as Japanese components and one piece cranks were then or that Japanese cars would be the top sellers. No, we were blissful in our ignorance. Apres nous, le deluge so to speak. And it washed Schwinn away.

rumrunn6

I remember Japan having a bigger stigma, left over from WWII.

Caferacernoc

I love my '85 Peloton. It is definitely a serious bike.

Kommisar89

You know back in the 90's when my son was wee young'un I bought him his first bike from Walmart, a Pacific. It was kids size hard suspension mountain bike (I refused to buy a bmx bike, worthless P O S), TIG welded cromoly steel, alloy rims, three piece alloy triple crank in front, 6 cogs out back, Shimano components. IIRC it was $185. It was not at all a bad bicycle. Of course now that I think about it, it was about 100x better than the crap they have there now. When my son outgrew it we passed it along to a coworker of mine for her young son.

Kommisar89

I don't really remember anybody holding anything against the Japanese because of the war by then but the destruction of their industrial economy and the need to start from scratch set them back many years and gave Japan the reputation for building cheap, low quality products in much the same way that later Taiwan and now China have that reputation. Of course it also allowed them to rebuild with fully modern factories and new production processes unburdened buy outdated legacy equipment and procedures.

dauphin

my first car was Datsun 1200....not even close to the quality of a Nissan of today...that was 1974...and my dad, a veteran of the Pacific theater in WWII had hard time buying that car...(sure the price helped)...times and perceptions change of course. My first bike was a Schwinn Sting Ray a few years earlier than that and it was the bee's knees...

roccobike

When I purchased my first adult bike, I went to an LBS. They promptly told me that Raleigh was the way to go because Schwinns were cheaply made and weighed a ton. Naturally, they pulled out a Schwinn Varsity and showed my why the Raleigh Record was way better than the Schwinn. They were right. What they didn't show me was the Schwinn LeTour or any other truely lighter weight Schwinn and I didn't know enough to ask. The bike "expert" I brought along owned a 3 speed Dunelt, but compared to my old Baronia balloon tire monster it was a speedster. So I was thrilled when I got a 28lb bike with 10 speeds. I remember asking my freind, what will I do with all those gears?
When I purchased a bike for my son in 2002, keeping in mind I had not returned to cycling yet, I bought a Trek because I couldn't find a Raleigh dealer. I was convinced Raleigh was better than Trek. Hey, it's all about perception. Most adults don't know crap about bicycles.

Grillparzer

Isn't Waterford Precision Cycles owned by a member of the Schwinn family?

duffer1960

Back in the day I had a Varsity and a neighbor kid had a Nishiki. Yes, the Nishiki was impressively light, but he tapped a curb and the downtube got wrinkled. I jumped curbs with my Varsity all the time -- and ran into the back of a car once -- and it never showed any damage.

nikkorod

I always thought fondly of Schwinns. I have owned many over the years. They started getting their act together in the late 70's and into the 80's. The 80's Schwinn X-tra lites were some well made bikes.
I have owned 2 Super Letour 12.2's that I regret getting rid of. I have also owned almost all of the 1986 line up to include, Super Sport, Tempo, Prelude and Passage. I still own the Passage. I have tried in every way imaginable to get rid of that bike, but when it comes down to it I just can't. It has an amazing ride. All of those bikes had Columbus Tenax tubing and relatively good Shimano or Suntour parts. Granted they are not high end, but each of them rode great. I just picked up an 83 Traveler for 5 bucks and will flip it to fund my Jamis Nova build. As with any mass produced bike the higher the model up the food chain the better the bike was.

Scooper

Yes; Richard Schwinn and Marc Muller are owners and partners in Waterford Precision Cycles. Marc was the Waterford plant manager for Schwinn from 1981 until the 1993 bankruptcy when he and Richard, who had managed the Greenville, MS Schwinn plant, bought the Waterford facility from the bankruptcy court and started Waterford Precision Cycles. Richard is the son of Edward Schwinn, Sr., who was the son of Frank W. Schwinn, who was the son of Schwinn's founder, Ignaz Schwinn.

RobbieTunes

This is interesting reading. I only knew of one kind of bike when I was 11, the Columbia I rode for a paper route. The Sting Ray came out and only one kid in town had one, but all our bikes that looked the same (my West Point from True Value Hardware included) were called sting rays.

Schwinn was what the kids had whose parents had new cars. Very few. Everyone got bikes either from the hardware store or the catalog store (Wards and Sears in the same office).

Italian? French? We had Italian kids and used French dressing sometimes. As far as bikes, it was whatever was in the catalog, or down where Mr. Mitchell negotiated with the dads on price. If someone actually wanted to drive 7 miles, they got a bike from Coast to Coast.

Which is why all those Japanese, French, and Italian bikes are so foreign to me. Or is that a pun?

Kommisar89

Over 50 maybe...I'm 47 and as I mentioned in another post, my friend's parents bought him a Schwinn because THEY though it was the bike (they had the new cars too come to think of it). Everybody I knew wanted an Atala, Bottecchia, Gitane, or Peugeot. Now those were the cool bikes!

Kommisar89

I don't think I remember anybody destroying a bike but I've it must have been an issue for a lot of youngsters used to jumping those old "paper boy" bikes and stingrays off curbs. I remember my mom telling me about how she (or maybe it was my aunt) would ride her heavy tank of a bike straight at a brick wall and jump off and watch the bike crash into the wall. Yeah, had to be my aunt now that I think about it. I can't picture my mom doing anything like

bbattle

I remember Schwinn completely missing the mountain bike craze and that was their fatal mistake.

Schwinn in the 70's- 80's may have been the Bose in terms of living on marketing hype but that still sold a lot of bikes.

badger_biker 

My experience and it seems that of a lot of posters, is that small town USA in the 1960's didn't offer much choice but the local hardware stores or maybe a Schwinn dealer. I traded in a 20" girls Schwinn handed down to me by my sister for a Ross 3 speed from the Coast to Coast. That was English built and as foreign as you could get back then. It wasn't until college when I got to a "city" and bought an Azuki in Madison that I realized what else was available.

I totally agree with many of the comments that in the 70's and 80's Schwinn missed the boat on marketing their higher end bikes and relied on the kids bikes sales and exposure to keep afloat and never shed that image.

cudak888 

I've always wondered how long it would take before someone used a Citizen Kane reference on this forum.

-Kurt

love2pedal.com

For about any person under 40, Schwinn was the bike their parents had and there was nothing special about the brand, like there was when I was growing up (I am 53) - they were already dying on the vine in the early 80s.

Here is a link to an interesting book about the rise and fall of Schwinn. It is about the blunders the family members made in the later years that lead to the eventual bankruptcy

https://www.amazon.com/No-Hands-Schwi.../dp/0805035532

roccobike

As a kid in north New Jersey, I remember wanting a Schwinn because they were thee bike to own but my price aware mom refused to pay extra when she could buy a department store bike for less (sound familiar?). When I went to college, 3 speed "english racers" were in. Dunelt, Raleigh and Sears were giving the local Schwinn dealer all the competition they didn't want. But by the time I was a young man in the 70's, Schwinn was already slipping badly and was thought of as a kids bike. Right or wrong, Raleigh ruled in the area where I lived. I vaguely remember Peugeot being around, but it was considered a rich man's bike.

gridplan

It's happened before.

Kommisar89

I was going to point that out...

cudak888 

I knew it wasn't this thread that I heard it.

-Kurt

Ronsonic 

My dad spent his entire life almost completely immune to brand names. As a result I grew up riding a bizarre array of obscure middleweight bikes of unknown origin and being a kid I didn't care as long as I was faster than the other kids I was racing. My recollection of Schwinn fell into three categories, big cruiser bikes for which I had no use, banana bikes and their pre-BMX kin which were slower than mine on any terrain, leaving me unimpressed and things like the Schwinn Varsity which weighed about as much as the cruisers and despite all the marginally functioning gears were also not fast.

Apparently Schwinn fell into the same trap Raleigh did in being very, very good at one thing and ending up with a huge factory full of equipment that was completely inefficient at making what was selling this year. The Schwinn electroforge technology was amazing and as long as the bikes you could make like that were selling they'd make them better and cheaper than the next guy. But things like the varsity were cruiser technology shaped like a race bike. absolutely useless to me. And, apparently, a lot of other people.

The stigma came in the later when the brand got shuffled around and ended up evoking "WalMart bike."

ozneddy

Wotsa Schwinn ? is it as good as a Huffy ? (gee,those guys over the lake get everything,no fair)

Ronsonic 

The stigma was the positive junk they were selling for export for years. It was a shattered economy with no infrastructure and Japanese industry was a stumbling wreck for years. Remember China's reputation as a maker of flip-flops and straw hats, like that but with worse quality control.

Mister Honda got his start making piston rings out of scrap metal, so much steel, so much cast iron.... stir and pour. His wife was the one going around scrounging the scrap and he built a small engine for her bike so she could get around better, others saw it and wanted one. That's where they were after the war. Scrounging.

Eventually the government got involved and severely restricted exports and imports. They became extremely image conscious and insisted on no more blow-molded garbage. This was partially successful at first and over the years evolved to their position today.