oldiebikes

We hear all the negative remarks about the "junk bikes" like Huffy, Murray, etc...

Well, one thing that I can't help but noticing is that many of these "junk bikes" are still roadworthy after a half century of use and abuse. Are they really that bad?

I appreciate the bikes classed as quality cycles and own a few of them. However, I've also owned many of the alleged "junkers" that I ride for a while and then sell(I just like to work on old bikes...it's a habit I can't kick). If I see the frame of an interesting bike at a thrift shop or garage sale, I gravitate towards it. It's a mission. I have to put it back on the road.

I've taken apart Sears bikes that were neglected for decades...bearings full of sand and spiderwebs. Yet after a bit of care, those bikes rode fine and looked amazingly nice for their age.

The one aspect of vintage bike repair that I hate is cottered cranks. I can almost hear dialogue rewritten from Indiana Jones..."Cottered cranks...why did it have to be cottered cranks".

steppinthefunk 

I have recently grown an affection for junkers as well. They are fun to ride and fun to build.

When building a junker your creativity isn;t limited by the need to keep everything correct as you sometimes are when building/restoring a classic.

As for the cottered cranks, I have a love/hate relationship with them. I love how the all look so classy with skinny crank arms and cool chainrings but I hate working on them.

vincev

I would not call them junk.The components are usually not meant for any serious milage.They were entry level stuff that started many of us towards serious riding and collecting.If you can pick them up cheaply enough they can be flipped for a few buck profit.They are usually not worth putting more than a tune up and a good cleaning.They are good for noobes to learn how to adjust derailers and tinker with road bikes.They do have their place in cycling.

balindamood

I have read somewhere (and I can no longer find the reference...someone please send it to me) that something like 90% of the bikes sold in the US are riden less than 100 miles over their lifetime. Over 80% of bikes sold in this country are sold at big-box stores from whence Huffies, Murrays, etc. come from.

There is a guy on this forum who bogut a GMC Denali bike from Walmart and then chronicled his daily commute on the bike, including all failures and repairs (I think his name is Cigtech). Anywhat, after several thousand miles with a couple of moderate repairs, he was hit by a car, and that was it (for the bike).

I would also state that the majority of people I see riding bikes becasue it is their ONLY means of non-transit transportation, are riding those same Huffies, Mongooses, or other bikes most bikers dismiss as POS's.

Based on the above, I have two things to note.

1). Most bikes sold in the US are over-designed (they clearly last more than the about 100 miles they will be used). Add to it people being sold bikes (generally at bike shops) which do not meet their needs (I have seen a rather over-weight gentleman COMMUTING on a carbon fiber Colnago with full team kit), I think the number is even higher.

2). The fact is that most of us would do just fine on big-box bikes. Further, there is a significant hole in the market. Specialy retail stores are selling bikes based on racing to people who do not need it. People who actually need transportation cannot afford anything but the big-box bikes whne they would likely benefit from things like fully sealed bearings and teflon-coated stainless cables.

Long live the old crappy 10-speed. They will certianly out-last just about anything being made by most of the major bike suppliers today.

To that end, I would argue

Moose

While I support your view that cheap bikes can put to use for many practical purposes and perform quite well, I would argue that better bikes are...well...BETTER!

slushlover2

The main problem is that it costs the same to refurbish a clunker as a nice bike. Tires and tubes cost the same. Cables and bearings cost the same. You can end up upside down in a clunker very easily. If you are doing this for a rider, you are still better starting with a nicer bike. The original purchase price is usually not that much higher.

cycleheimer

I see many low-end (Huffy & the like) bikes being ridden to work by what appears to be relatively recent immigrants to this country commuting to work at restaurants, supermarkets, and the like. I see the same bikes parked near stores over a long period of time, and see the same guys on their low-end bikes commuting at the same time I drive to work. I guess they are functional if maintained. As are American cars from the 50s...still being used as daily drivers in Cuba.

bikerosity57

Well, I think many are just plain JUNK! They are difficult or impossible to repair properly. They are WAY over engineered to avoid law suits. They don't shift well. etc....
Having said all that, I still once in a while find one that I really like. Some, like that foriegn made Schwinns, and department store bikes ride, look, and repair fairly nicely. Some I wish I never got rid of(Schwinn traveler five speed townie:-( )

wahoonc

I see those same bikes and if you look closely (at least at the ones I see) they quite often only have one working gear, might or might not have fully functioning brakes, warped wheels, etc. They are usually ridden at very low speeds, usually just slightly faster than a good walk.

The older (prior to 1990 or so) department store bikes weren't great but they weren't the BSOs that we see today. I cannot fathom how someone would believe that you can get a double suspension, 27 speed mountain bike for $69.95 and expect it to be workable. Yet WM sells thousands of them. They also have a decent (for WM) Mongoose Paver for ~$135 that is a workable 7 speed. They also sell the Huffy Cranbrook Cruiser for $~90, that is a single speed coaster with a cheap self destructing rear hub. Yet people still continue to purchase the flashy disposable bikes, because they think 27 speeds for $69.95 has to be the better deal.

Aaron

SweetLou

I totally agree. I hate working on those bikes. All the other mechanics at the shop hate working on those bikes. They always take much longer to repair and they are never quite right.

If I found one, I would not even fix it up to give it away. I think those bikes discourage bike riding.

Grim

Exactly!
When I am looking for bikes to clean up and refurb I won't touch a low end bike if it needs anything more then a wash. If it needs tires I walk. Huffy MIGHT bring $40-50 is it is very good shape. If you have to put $25 into it after buying it for $10 and wait 3 weeks to sell it....just not worth the effort. Place I get most of my bikes from rates like this.
Rideable,and clean road bikes. $25.
flat tires road bike $13. ( I am aware of a rare Fuji that brought $500 on a flip as well as a late 90's Schwinn with Brifters that sold for $190 for for this out of that store picked up by a local that flips)

Rust, dirty, flat tires road $9.88

Mtb that is clean and rideable $15
Mt needing anything at all $9.88

Bikes I have bought from them.

80's Schwinn Cruiser (Mtb style) supreme 6 speed with brand NEW but flat tires and lots of chipped paint. $9.88 sold for $40 after new grips cleaning an adjusting. Took 4 weeks to sell. Only bought it becasue of the tires.

87 18" Regena Terry Gambit that had maybe 50 miles on it (Free hub was still clean). Tires were flat and it was dirty but it was obviously a good bike to even the novice eye. $13. Kept it for the wife but I could sell it in a heart beat on the Terry site or Ebay for $200 becasue of its rarity. Cleaned and serviced...needed no parts. Factory tires still good and hold air (but I will replace the tubes when the wife decides to start riding)

Huffy St mountain Good tires but needing air. Needed FD adjusted and cleaned. $9.88. Selling to my boss for $30 for his wife after I clean it up extra nice for her. I am putting more effort into it then I would have to flip it becasue it is for the bosses wife. He knows what I picked it up for. He knows she will ride it 2-3 times and he will end up sending it off to Goodwill in 2 years. He refused to buy a $100 wally bike becasue he knew that A. it would not get rode much by his wife or B. his sons would destroy it. So $30 is saving him $70 is the way he looks at it. I would have bought it anyway since it needed so little but I'b been happy if it sold for $40 after 2-3 weeks.

Bought this week 80's Schwinn World Sport 25 inch frame, dyno light rig, seat bag. Complete bike with original tires. Tires flat, FILTHY some rust on the sprockets, needs a complete tune up. Has maybe 500 miles on it. $13 becasue it had Dyno lights. It needs a lot of TLC but I filled the tires and rode it. It hits all gears. It will need tires, tubes and a full tune up. Pretty sure it will go for $150 if I don't keep it for a single speed to play with for a while.

Bought this week 76 Varsity, Complete bike original tires that are SHOT. Rust on the rims but everything works. Paint looks good. $9.88. Lot of elbow grease and tires and tubes. Should sell for $120.


It is just not worth picking up bottom of the barrel bikes to flip. Hate seeing them go to the dump but just not worth the effort or expense to mess with for flipping. If you are looking for somethign to play with...fine. Looking for somthing to give the neighbor kid or donate to a bikes for kids program...fine.

Bioflamingo

I have an older Huffy cruiser that I invested a whole $10 on in a set of used, but like new, whitewall tires. I ride it occasionally down main street, and you'd be surprised how many people think it's a cool bike. Which it is imo, but I'd be scared to go more than 7 or 8 mph on it. It makes some very weird noises at those speeds. Even when I'm at my shop with all my bikes lined up out front and people walk by the first bike they point to is that Huffy. There's just something about a beach cruiser that people(including me) can't resist. I even spent the effort pulling the bike out of a dumpster full of dog sh*t to get it.

bbattle

Who the heck buys what they NEED when they've got a few extra dollars to get what they WANT? This is the Classic and Vintage forum and the n +1 rule doesn't apply, the n^2 + 2n + 1 rule does.

And who is to judge a person that buys what they WANT over what they NEED. We don't know the story behind the overweight guy with the expensive bike.


Those old Muffies and Free Spirits are not reliable bikes; many have highly suspect braking, shifting is neglible, bearings are shot, chain rusty, tires cracked. They are at the bottom of the ladder. I know the guy that runs the co-op that fixes these bikes and I work in an area where I get to see them on a daily basis. Usually weaving down the wrong side of the road. I've fixed up a couple of these bikes and it meant putting some decent brakes on them, replacing cables, and adjusting the derailleurs and hoping they'll stay that way. Or converting them to singlespeed. But dropouts held in place by crimping the stays is just plain wrong; I don't touch those.

You don't see thirty year old Colnagos being used by the poor because they are in the hands of collectors. There also weren't that many of them around to begin with in comparison to the Schwinns, Raleighs, Free Spirits, Huffies, Murrays, Magnas, etc.

roccobike

I've worked on Murrays and Huffys. The reason SOME of them have lasted this long is not that they were well built low end bikes but they were so poorly built they were not ridden so they're still here.
When it comes to Huffy, I've come across plenty of exceptions. The Concours, the Techtra (road) and the Ironman (MTB) were well made, with low end components. But proprely maintained should last a long time.
The Murrays I've seen were really sad. I guess I'm biased, but thats because I've only come across one Murray bike (an MTB) that was worth refurbishing. There were others I've looked at and just left for someone else.
On the other hand, someone mentioned Sears bikes (Free Spirit). I've yet to find one that was junk. Low end, yes, but not junk. They usually used low end parts but can be refurbished and used. I've got three in the basement now. Two are being donated to my church for their annual bicycle youth ministry where they give bikes to needy kids. Both are worthy bikes needing only tires (we'll add them at the church).
As for today's bikes, I cringe when I see a Magna, I feel a little bit better about a Roadmaster, at least they use better brakes so you can stop it if you ever get it going. I have a much better feeling about Schwinn. Some of them are actually nice bikes, but need the hand of a good mechanic to set them up properly. I've got a 2006 Varsity that someone sold cheap on CL. Once correctly tuned/adusted it's a really nice bike with a half-way decent ride.

Flying Merkel

I remember riding a Huffy 10 speed back in '79 because I had to. Awful bike. Cheap, ugly, impossible to keep in tune. Nothing worked the same from the beginning of the ride to the end. I swear the rims warped in response to the temperature. Had this horrible heavy dead feeling about it. If this was the only bike I had ever ridden I would not have wanted to ride ever again. In retrospect, I should have found a coaster brake rear wheel & trashed the derailer & brakes on the Huffy. My sister had bought it at Gemco for $39.95. It was about as good as you could have expected for the price. I got it because she had given up on it.


A few months later, my father bought me a Univega Viva Sport for graduation. It was a revelation. Never knew that a bike could be so good and reliable.

In retrospect, I should have found a coaster brake rear wheel & trashed the derailer & brakes on the Huffy.

7speed

This is what I was thinking - basically that the cr@p bikes of yesterday aren't nearly as bad as the cr@p bikes of today!

I'll pick up any garbage bike I see with the idea that there might be some part on it I can use. The steel Huffys, Murrays, Free Spirits are a thing of beauty compared to Magna, Next, etc.

There's no such thing as department store suspension.

wahoonc

I won't pay for anything that WM sells today But if someone gives them to me, I will strip the usable items off of them and recycle the rest. Back before scrap metal prices crapped I was getting about ~$5-6 for a scrap frame. Toss in a handful of other cheap aluminum parts and a Magna was worth $10 in scrap materials, quite often I could reuse the tires and tubes.

Aaron

balindamood

I think you have missed my point (both of them).

1). They may be "junk", but if most of them only have to go 100 miles in their lifetime, who cares? One might proffer that they would go farther if they were built better, but I doubt that it would be a significant percentage.

2). Bikes are, at the end of the day, transportation. They may only have one functioning gear, one semi-functioning brake, etc., but alot of them are being used. They fill a need for those who need cheap transportation. My issue is that there ARE older, cheaper parts parts whihc will work far better than the techno-junk which they come with, but no one (SRAM/Shimano) does not service that market. You either get cheap/crap or high-end racing stuff. You can recently get expensive/weird/reliable (Nexus/Alfine), but we need more cheap/reliable.

BTW- If you think that I can only manage walking speed on my Huffy (Concours), I think you may be surprised. It had several thousand miles on it, and I have RACED it once...and did not finish last. Yeah, it was on a bet.

Bikedued

I've been looking at the Mongoose paver lately, and with a wheel and derailleur swap it could be a rather nice bike IMHO. I haven't seen any W Mart bikes over 7 speed in back, as they seem to be stuck in that era while the bikes look somewhat modern. After a couple of years of only buying better vintage bikes, I picked up an exage brake Miyata. Model 312 in that eyeball searing turquoise. The lower level exage brakes were an absolute PITA to adjust and center after working on nothing but 105 and 600 equipped bikes. I guess I've been spoiled, hehe.

Ditto on the transportation bikes I see being ridden down every sidewalk in my neighborhood. If they have linear pulls or canti's, at least one of the pairs are hanging wide open, with or without cables still attached. The back wheel is always visibly out of true. Some are being in ridden poor mans SS style with a loose fitting chain. The seats are almost always covered in some sort of duct tape. Both tires are really low on air, and cord showing on the tread. 99% of the time they're ladies bikes too, guess I haven't figured that out yet.,,,,BD

There are two bikes in my neighborhood that I want to get a closer look at. One is a large frame size that looks like a mid eighties nishiki, with symmetry style DT shifters. It's being ridden by a guy about 5'9" and it's way too big for him. Another is a black rainbow stripe Peugeot that is a SS or FG being ridden at a scary fast speed. He can handle it for sure. I just wanna say WHOA, and see what frame it is. Those are about the only two exceptions to the spraybombed Roadmasters and Magnas.

IceNine

Hard to know which came first, the chicken or the egg. A lot of the people who are riding these bikes aren't really doing it because they enjoy biking, they are riding a bike because it is very cheap and they can't afford a car or have lost their driver's license. Or perhaps they need to save up for a few months so they can afford to fix their old car. I wonder how many of the riders know how to make simple adjustments to derailers and brakes or handlebars and seatposts. They'd be so much better off with friction shifters than el cheapo index shifters. I often see ads in craigslist for these bikes saying that the bike was only ridden twice. I don't doubt it for most of them. If that's all I knew about biking I'd probably quit after riding twice as well.

Blue Order

+1

People buy a cheap bike because they can't see spending more money on something they might not enjoy, and then the cheap bike (combined with their lack of fitness) leads them to the conclusion that they don't enjoy biking-- thus confirming for them that they were right not to spend more in the first place...

krems81 

The very cheapest available blender in 1985 was much less of a POS than the cheapest available blender today. (It'd be interesting finding out where you have to go for the cheapest new blender today). The same goes for bikes. I don't mind 20 year old department store bikes so much. They generally do their job if tuned up right. I won't have anything to do with today's department store bikes. Trying to fix one is like going against the grain, or swimming upstream. They just weren't made to be fixed.

Doohickie

The mechanic at my LBS mentioned he read an article about these bikes, and remarked the same thing about most bikes only being ridden a small amount of miles. The article also researched how they were used and noted that the stereotypical immigrant-using-it-for-transportation, they are good for many more miles than that, but if you look at their riding style, they are not stressing the bike to its limits. People who ride an x-mart bike hard will have a pile of bike parts in no time at all. But if you're just kind of cruising along to get to work, knowing you don't have to be there for another 30 minutes and it's only 3 miles away, well, even a cheap bike will last a long time under those conditions.

But when those bikes break down, they are a pain to repair because they are built of junk.

I agree that there is a segment of the population that could use better-than-x-mart bikes, but don't need high-end racers. My LBS recognizes this too and they try to stock bikes for that segment of the market. They are, incidentally, doing pretty well in spite of the recession.

Blue Order

Hybrids...

krems81 

If they're junk and never get used, why make them? So they can fill landfills and create a problem for future generations to sort out? I see those bikes on the back of scrap metal trucks every day, and I never even think of stopping them.

And as for cheap transportation, I know some people are poor. But the working poor spend more money riding the bus daily for 3 months than they would on a nice restored vintage bike from a reasonable flipper. I say keep building good bikes at the factories (or at least bikes that were made to work, and even free spirits qualify!), and instead of being hauled for scrap, they will be rebuilt and given new lives. There's no reason to keep hauling away walmart bikes by the dozens (and the scrap yard is where they belong) while the rest of us search high and low for bikes old enough (i.e. 80s) to be worth rebuilding.