Originally posted by vfboomer
My greatest reward was a really nice "Free Spirit" 3 speed bike. I ended up taking it home to clean up and I was going to give to one of the secretaries at work. I left it outside my home the night before and someone stole it. Easy come, Easy Go!
One often things of bike thieves as quick-moving.
However, if the thief rode off on that Free Spirit, that must have been one slow-moving thief. I have a Free Spirit 3 speed among my bikes, and its massively heavy wheels provide a lot of resistance when trying to cycle. It's a difficult problem to correct. They don't make this type of wheel anymore, and any matching wheel that I would find refurbished/used would be just as heavy. And if I were to custom build my own wheel, I would be forced to reuse the existing hub, etc., guaranteeing that the custom wheel would be quite heavy as well. (And if I'm going to go to all of the trouble of customizing the bike so that it could take different wheels, etc., I would be far better off starting with a different frame altogether than the Free Spirit 3-speed frame.)