Saturday, April 29, 2006

Dont laugh


So yeah, today was the bike auction. Got there at like 15 mins after the viewing time was started (8:15a) and began looking around. Most of the bikes were junk. Most of them were Walmart/Target Roadmasters and Motiv's etc. But there were a couple pretty cool rigs in the lot, well potentially cool bikes. I began writing down the lot numbers of bikes that I thought had potential.

In my last walkthrough, I saw this Schwinn CrissCross that I missed on the first and second go around. I was looking for bikes with drop bars, nothing like this for sure. Well, first I noticed the name "CrissCross". Then I took a closer look and noticed it had front and rear cantilever brakes--thats good. Then I checked to see what size tires it was running 700x35 front and back---thats good too. I checked the tire clearance and there looked to be plenty of that as well! I wrote down the lot number and "cross bike" next to it.

The two main things I was looking for was a bike that took 700c or 27" wheels and that had plenty of room for a 32mm tire. This bike had that, AND it had canti mounts already. Meaning no need for a new front fork, and no need to have my local framebuilder weld on some rear canti braze on. Bonus!

This bike's lot number was 61, which was good cause they had 418 bikes or so and didnt want to have to wait for 2.5-3 hours to bid on it. A lot of the Schwinn's were going for $50 ish and the beach cruisers were selling in the $80-$110 range. College kids like their beach cruisers.

When lot 61 came up, some people started bidding, it got up to $30 and stalled, then I bid. I got into a little bidding war with another buyer, and honestly, I didnt really know what was going on. All I know is that I bought it for $65 plus $4 tax.

In the next week, I'll be tearing this bike down, painting it, and making it into a raceable cyclocross bike.

I havent decided what I'm going to do with it when I'm done building it up. Although, I know im not going to keep it, as I have enough bikes for now as it is. One thought I had was to sell it on Ebay and donate the money to charity like LAF. Another was to give it away to the person that writes me the best story on why they need this cyclocross bike. What do you guys think I should do?

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