Originally Posted by
auchencrow
Imagine it's December 24, 1973, and you're still in junior high...
(I guess that many of you were about 40 years old in 1973, but just imagine that you were still in junior high
)
Mom and dad have decided to buy you a brand new 10-speed as a very special Christmas gift
, but you must decide between four models that are for sale at the LBS.
- No fancy Italians to chose from, but just your basic 10-speeds, because mom is a housewife, and dad works the midnight shift at the local rubber-duckie factory.
You must choose between a Peugeot U08, a Raleigh Grand Prix, a Schwinn Continental, or a Fuji Special Road Racer (AKA S-10-S).
I come damn close to the age in your example. I turned 14 in 1973 and was a high school freshman. My mom was a housewife and my dad worked third shift as a boiler operator at a paper mill.
In the small farming community I grew up in we had no LBS. None of the OP's bikes were available to me. There were two hardware stores that sold bikes. One had Huffy and the other Kent. We did have a hunting/fishing store that briefly got into bike sales. They sold Sekine bikes. They were so much lighter and exotic than those hardware store bikes. A couple of my friends had Sekine 10 speeds, I had a Kent 3 speed. Later, we purchased one of my friend's used Sekine 10 speeds.
So, being that the Fuji is closest of the brands to my Sekine, that would be the direction I would go.