Originally Posted by
sykerocker
To save you the effort of having to drop back a couple of pages, I'm recopying one of the points from something I wrote two days ago:
"3. One constant sub-thread I'm seeing weaving in and out of the constant and cheap pillorying of the Schwinn Varsity. This is something, from my bike shop experience, that I'm going to vehemently disagree with - to the point that I consider the Varsity the greatest 10-speed sold in America, ever. Why? Look at the clientele: 20-something who hadn't touched a bicycle in ten years, and the last bike they had previously ridden was a paperboy "middleweight" that they bounced on and off curves, ran thru potholes, etc., etc., etc. And now they were looking for their first adult road bike - with all those old habits still intact.
For 99% of our customers, the Schwinn Varsity was the perfect bicycle. Some of the things I saw done to Varsities back for service would have collapsed an Astra or Roger Riviere completely. The Varsity was the perfect road bike for the first time, boom-addled wannabe roadie. And if they were still interested in road bikes after the Bike Boom Collapse, we'd happily sell them something European or Japanese, light and proper, because they'd learned the care and feeding of a road bike.
So lighten up. Yeah, for those of us who learned European road bikes from God at the age of 18, we wouldn't be caught dead on a Varsity. But then, we didn't need to go thru that step. That's why Adams Cycle also carried Raleigh which Merle, the owner, always considered a much superior line of bikes - especially the Sports and Tourist."
As Bandera points out, to the person trying to make a living in the bicycle business 531/COLUMBUS TUBED, CAMPAGNOLO EQUIPPED, HIGH END RACING BICYCLES DIDN'T MATTER! They were expensive, temperamental, and their customers usual more so: demanding, opinionated, often obnoxious. Those customers and those bikes didn't affect the profit and loss of the average bicycle shop. Varsities did, and back in the first half of the70's no Schwinn dealer could get enough of them. And dealers who didn't have Schwinn franchises wished they did, because the customers they were getting were those turned away from the Schwinn dealership due to lack of available product.
In the years I've been here, I've found the usual "love Colnagos, hate Varsities" to be very parallel with what I run into in the auto blogs. "Ferraris are wonderful, Corollas are crap." As usual, the purists are jaded, opinionated and often very wrong.
Nothing you said actually explained the schwinn varsity. Raleigh made a lot of cheap lugged gas pipe 5 and 10 speed bikes in the same period, under their own brand and others. None of them weighed the wrong side of 15kg and all of them were indestructible.
As an example, my early 70s Sun Solo. I got that thing after it'd spent possibly a decade buried in a ditch. It had several layers of house paint on it, and the seatstays were bent in several places. I pulled it straight using a plank of wood and rode it daily for almost five years across everything from frozen tractor prints in mud paths to skate parks and it didn't break. It's latest incarnation has a hard mounted 66CC chinese two stroke driving the rear wheel via a 44T sprocket on a rag joint. When the bike was new it was marketed at teenagers, who'd typically replace the drops with north road "cowhorns" and spend all day hammering up and down curbs and over wood plank ramps.
That is why I don't understand the varsity. It wasn't any cheaper or more rugged than a bottom of the barrel Nottingham Raleigh, but it was heavier and from photos looks to have geometry like a pre-war roadster. Was there a spoon brake special edition?