I haven't weighed one, but that sounds plausible. You have to take a Varsity apart to believe it. Each individual Schwinn-made component is immensely heavy, each for a reason. The Ashtabula style cranks are heavier than those on department store bikes. Perhaps the most impressively heavy components are the handlebars and stem. They seem gratuitously heavy, until you consider what it's good for. I have a department store bike whose heavy steel stem is bent to the side, clearly from a terrific collision. I can't quite comprehend what teenagers do on their bikes, and I'm probably better off that way.

Balindamood, very good post. If Schwinn had seen the handwriting on the walls well in advance, they still could not have adapted. I worked at Lucent Technologies when it tried to become an outsourcing paper company. It was a failure, because we knew how to manage our own factories but not external suppliers.