Originally Posted by
Buellster
There is a Puch for sale here thats dropping in price because no one is interested. I wonder if it's a decent model...
I've been eyeing some raliegh bikes but the years are mostly 80s which I hear are when they were downhill from the initial quaility.
You should post a link to the bicycle, if say it's on Craigslist, and let people chime on it. My original Puch Pathfinder AD was definitely "entry level", with many parts that had steel instead of alloy bits and bobs. And I immediately made some alterations to it... swapping stem shifters for down shifters, toeclips and cages, doing away with the brake extension levers, shiny Benotto tape... but those were pier-driven, and didn't have much to do with the ride of the bicycle. By the eighties, entry-level bikes were so price competitive across the board, almost all of them represent a great bike for your buck bang. The Puch/Austro Daimlers looked classy, with well finished lug work and rich looking paint, and had that foreign name mystic going for them. I paid a few more shekels to obtain the Austrian made, as opposed to the probably-just-as-good Japan made, model... just for country-of-origin aura. I think the frame was on par with other makes... just some of the part selections might have been weighty, to be competitive with larger, more established brands, like Schwinn, Fuji, etc.