I've been real addicted to craigslist bikes listings now. Some ebay too, but it's not as fun, there's always some dipsh*t out there willing to pay retarded amounts of money for everything on ebay almost all the time. If you act fast, you can still get a great deal on CL. I have to confess, I've been buying some things on craigslist. I got a new Fuji Royale II for the missus (pics coming soon of this), A big old Raleigh Marathon I'm going to clean up for a friend, and before all those I got a circa '84 Schwinn Traveler and a couple of Schwinn Continentals for $80. The traveler was 4130 lugged CroMoly, in not-terrible shape, the 2 Continentals were both '70s fillet brazed pretty heavy models. Choosing my battles, I decided to drop the 2 Continentals with Working Bikes and see what I could do with the Traveler. Sadly, I did not take pics of the "during" phase. I ended up sanding the frame down to metal, re-primed and painted it. Cleaned up all the parts, disassembled and rebuilt the wheels, changed out the bars, new cables, bar tape, tires and tubes. It turned out so pretty that I'm somewhat sad to see it go. However, it's leaving for a life as a friend's new bike.
Here are some pics. I left the very nice paint on the headtube, which helped my spray paint job look a heck of a lot nicer. I really like the aesthetics of the old diacompe center pull brakes. Even the old seat/seatpost combo looks pretty good! I think I ended up with about another $60/$80 in parts on it. Pretty good end result!
I'm currently looking for a second bike for myself that I can put a rack on (I could probably bootleg a rack on to the Paramount though it doesn't have any braze-ons at the droputs, but I can't quite bring myself to do it). I'm hoping to find a large frame similar to this one (an old Schwinn, Panasonic, Miyata or something along those lines) that I can fix up for this purpose, I have most of the parts sitting around, including some really sexy mystery rims that I just finished finding some semi-matching hubs for. Here are the rims:
They are some light double walled aluminum with brass eyelets, real thin, if anyone (Norm?) knows anything about them, let me know! I just bought them (of course) on craigslist. I got some NOS folding skinny 27" Avocet tires for them from Harris Cyclery I'll post more pics after I build them up. I'll have to recruit some help to figure out the spoke sizes, since I can't just consult the charts on an unknown rim. But once I get that sorted out, they are going to be some real nice wheels I think.
Here is a picture of my (bootleg) shop and also Marge the dog, my faithful yard companion when I'm out tinkering.
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