It's fun to joke about CL buyers and sellers, but I'm hoping some other people have some good stories about dealing through CL and other ways of buying and selling bikes. I've almost always had fun and met nice folks when buying or selling through CL.


I bought a $200 bicycle on CL, just because I thought it was cool and wanted to try it out. It was maybe a $600 bike originally, make and model doesn't matter, it looked like a good deal. I had fun riding it for few months, and then flipped it at the same $200.


I had a phone conversation with the buyers before they came to get it, and made clear I like to work on bikes, I did not need to sell this bike so much I'd rip them off, they were welcome to come take a ride, and leave it if they didn't like it - no offense taken.


They loved the bike, and bought it. As I was helping them load it into their truck, they took out an old Free Spirit ladies 3 speed and said "You can have this for free if you want it. We don't know what to do with it. You can sell it or give it to charity, we don't care, we just appreciate that you were nice on the phone."


I sold two bikes to a very nice lady tonight. She came to buy one bike, but I had another that was similar and she bought both. When I started to show her a few things to watch and how to adjust them, she patiently let me explain it. The bike had a creaky crank when I got it, all it needed was about a half turn of the crank bolt to fix it. When I told her she might need a larger Allen key than most people have on hand for the crank nut if it started creaking again, she finally confessed that she was an aircraft mechanic, and she'd be fine.


We had a laugh over that, and as I helped her load the two bikes into her rented SUV, she asked if I knew what a Raleigh Chopper was. I said, "Yeah, classic muscle bike, Raleigh's answer to the Stingray." She said, "I helped design that bike." I knew she was too young to have done that, but I didn't challenge her on it. She laughed and said, "My Dad was the (highly placed executive, I won't name him here) of Raleigh. When Raleigh was first designing the Chopper, he brought home a prototype and told me to ride it. I crashed it, and told him it was not right. He told the design team and they redesigned it for better stability."


She had only meant to spend $200 for the one bike but she dug through her purse and came up with $399 - a dollar short of the $200 per bike "firm" price. After she left she called me again. It was too late to stop at the bank and she just realized there was a $2 toll on the way home. I told her come back, and I gave her $5 back to make sure she could get home. When she got home, she texted me saying that when she gets moved down here, she would show me a book on Raleigh bikes where I could find the story of her dad and his involvement with the Chopper.

(Edited to correct the incorrect statement that she "texted me the name of the book." When I went back to the text to get the name for Bmach, I realized I had mis-stated this.)


So, not everybody on CL is a bike thief, and not all buyers are cheapskates. Feel free to post any good stories you have.