ultra-g

This guy's been posting the same bike on Craigslist for a while now (at least as I can recall):

https://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/bik/61147608.html

Is it a piece of cr-ap or something?

dolface

i'm pretty sure that spaldings are garbage. i saw one the other day and it looked like it had been made out of cardboard and stapled together.

Jesse M

it's an applecart bike...

ultra-g

LOL! Vivid description.

bombusben

yea, if it's anything like the spaldings I've seen, it is a complete piece of crap

Ya Tu Sabes

For starters, it ain't a real track hub, which makes the asking price a little high, in my opinion. I think this is a guy who used to sell a ton of these loc-tite jobs on ebay (I recognize his little spiel about developing pedal cadence, and the ebay seller's location was always "Sunny SoCal," and this ad says the guy just moved from Cali).

absntr

I posted about this a while ago in the ebay/craigslist thread. What he had said in that one was that the bike was on its way from Cali - I looked up the bike on ebay and it was an applecart2 job - it went for $100 or something.

In a word, SCAM.

timmhaan

he asking 250 but will accept offers of up to 300?? that's weird.

SamHouston

hmmm yes, if that's how it works I've got an old shoe here that I'm asking $3 for but I'll consider offers of $500 or more

Jinks

That bike was sold two or three weeks ago on ebay by applecart. I was thinking about getting one of his fixies, but definitely not a spalding. What's wrong with applecart? His bikes seem ok, or am I setting myself up if I buy one?

bombusben

In most cases, Applecart's bikes are almost worth the shipping.

filtersweep

That's hilarious... and probably true. $250?!? Truely insane.

ostro

I wonder how many applecart riders there are in this forum? I will say that when i was first considering fixed, i saw these on ebay and it was tempting, but a friend talked some sense into me and talked me into converting my roadie.

charlesw

Yu Tu Sabes, the Spalding bike listed above has a loc ring- doesen't that mean that the bike has a track hub?

Honestly, I think $100 for a converted roadie is a great deal. (plus $30 shipping)

I'll bet a large amount of people don't have the bike bins/bike friends/swap meets you all have.

If I want to make a fixed gear bike, I'll need to find a well-working geared bike ($50), then slap a rear wheel on it ($80? 100?), then replace the tires ($25).. bringing me in above Applecart's stuff.

I have a frame waiting to be converted and I'm still looking for a cheap fixed rear wheel. As long as the fixies have a lock ring, I think they are a good idea.

I've been trying to learn as much about fixing as possible- did I miss a way to get a cheap(er) rear wheel?

bostontrevor

Bottom bracket lockring.

Sure, you'd come in above applecart stuff because you've just built a proper fixed gear bicycle. If instead you wanted to do it applecart style, it's $50 for a working geared bike, $10 for a cheapo cog, $5 for a lockring. Remove the cluster, redish, put on the the cog and ring with some loctite and you're out the door.

andygates

Bottom bracket lockring? That's like no lockring at all, but heavier, right? LOL

bostontrevor

Well in theory you can snug the lockring against the cog and just like other same-threaded locking setups (say cone and locknut), the inside one will place stress against the thread faces in an opposite direction from the outside one, making it difficult to turn.

In practice it works for some and others have real bad experiences. Care to roll the dice?

pitboss

You are better of drawing a bike on the box he ships his "track" bikes in and riding that around, pretending you got something worthwhile.
I say do it yourself, get the parts you want, and learning a little along the way.

Ya Tu Sabes

Good point - I just think that if you want to do the cheapie way, it's more fun and more edifying to do it yourself, you can make the bike more the way you like it, and you don't pay some boxing fee. (But see what bostontrevor said above regarding the track hub question.) Also, it's my experience that a working geared bike can often be found for free or almost free.

charlesw

BostonTrevor: Thanks for explaining. So when he says "lockring" he means a "same-threaded lockring", not a true track-standard opposing threads lockring from a track hub, right?

Yu Tu Sabes: Yeah, perhaps around you. You'd be suprised. LA isn't like other cities. For some reason the "good quality geared road bike cache" has been picked mostly dry. Now and then bikes come up.. but they are hard to find.

bostontrevor

'fraid so.