Originally Posted by wethepeople
i never have bought a new tube, i get them out of old working bikes.
If I get a bike with a good tube, of course I'll use it. It's way more common to get bikes with no tubes, maybe because the flat tire is the last straw for the bike owner, who then tosses the whole bike on the curb and buys a new one on sale at K-Mart for $99.
Last month I got a nice brown Ross ladies 3-speed with perfect chrome and a great rear rack. It was laying on the curb with a light coating of dryer fuzz on it, and the back tire halfway demounted and the tube yanked out, laying on the sidewalk like entrails.
After fixing the tube and replacing the tire with one from my junkpile, I took it for a ride. Pretty good brakes, bearings seemed okay, the hub shifted flawlessly. It had the appearance of a bike that had seen the street many years before, and then led the next twenty years as a shut-in sitting in somebody's garage. Literally nothing else wrong with it.
The owner may have thrown it away when they discovered that tools would be required to fix the flat. For some people tools are like kryptonite.