Originally Posted by
noglider
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.
Don't forget Schwinn's preference for a solid forged fork either. Some of the weight on Schwinn's IS just gratuitous, because they believed that heaviness reinforced perceptions of quality. The chain guards for instance are definitely thicker than they need to be - the mounting brackets almost comically so.
Kind of makes me wonder why they even bothered with the alloy weinmanns... personality crisis?