In your price range, ebay does not make any sense unless you can do a local pickup option. I did pick up a nice bike off ebay two weeks ago (local pickup). But such deals are pretty rare, and local pickup for me was 110 miles away, one way!! For close to the cost of shipping alone, you can find a pretty good bike locally. The cheapest place for a bike is word of mouth, then a garage sale, then thrift shops, then scoop deals on Craigs List. I pick up at least a bike a week at garage sales. Picked up two yesterday. Picked up a third bike free (word of mouth, come get it out of the back of my truck before I take it to the dump).

Buy the book: "Complete Guide to Upgrading your Bike" by Frank Berto. It is the best book on 1970s/1980s bikes (it was published in 1988), and the first chapter will educate you on the difference between great bikes, good bikes and mediocre bikes. You can find one used on Amazon for 20 cents plus shipping. I just bought another copy myself. Or check your local library. They should reissue this book with a new title: "A Complete Guide To 1970s/1980s Vintage Bikes". Realize it was not written about vintage bikes at the time. It was written about the latest and greatest bikes available then.

Take time up front to get educated and you will do fine. In any transaction, the person with the most knowledge wins.

If you want to scoop up a smokin hot deal on Craigs List, you need a couple of things.

1) You need to know your size, and have the ability to look at a bike picture and estimate the size (sellers rarely know sizing information, and the best deals are Craigs List ads with little/no information)
2) You need to be able to jump in the car and drive immediately as soon as you see the ad. The best deals will not wait until it is convenient for you: after work, this weekend, in a couple of days, whatever.
3) You need to be able to size up a bike quickly and know when it is a deal with just the sketchy information I mentioned above.
4) You need to be willing to waste some time and gas chasing after deals that aren't good deals.

The sellers who can describe their bikes perfectly, have great pictures, sizing information, list the components, etc., are sellers like me. Those sellers will expect to get full market value for their bike (some of them will attempt to get more than market value).


The best deals tend to be Japanese bikes from the 1980s. Raleigh, Ross and Schwinn made some good stuff, and also a lot of cheap stuff, so you need to be pretty careful with those brands.