Originally Posted by
Darth Lefty
You can say Varsities were heavy but you can't seriously say they were of poor quality for their price relative to anything else on the market in the 60's. This is because there basically wasn't any market before the bike boom. I invite you to look at your local Craigslist for 1960's bikes and see what you find. It will mostly be kid bikes and cruisers. The market for multiple-speed adult bicycles was less than 200,000 a year. The only serious competitor was Raleigh. The other competitors were Murray and Huffy and department store bikes that were really dreadful, or much racier imports. The (French!) RD is armored, the single-piece crank has a patented stamped-in shifting ramp and a disk that actually keeps your shoelaces out of the chain, the shifters work very nicely, and the whole package is stone-axe reliable. If you wanted something nicer they had that too, Super Sports with chrome steel frames and Paramounts with lugs and butted tubes.
The thing is, given their control of the U.S. market, Schwinn could certainly have made bikes weighing 5-8 pounds less at the price points where they sold Continentals and Varsities. Raleigh was selling the Grand Prix in that space. It was only several years later that Schwinn was making and selling the LeTour in that space. Schwinn never really pushed the Super Sport the way they did the Varsity and Continental. Frankly, price vs. quality, the Paramount was the bargain of the Schwinn product line in the 1970s, as it sold for only 3x what a Varsity sold for, and less than 5x what a big box Huffy sold for at the time.