Oh come on, aren't you underestimating a bit?
I'm sure that after a bit you get a sort of 'assembly line' thing going, but an hour to 'ebay' the parts?
How many parts would you take off one bike? somewhere between 8 - 20, maybe? (Guesstimating) I assume you sell the wheelsets and not just the hubs but I could be wrong. And only one hour to take a bunch of pictures of each part, write a description for each part, post each part on ebay and set it all up? And then after that, spending the time boxing, packing, labeling, and hustling everything down to the post office (or UPS or whatever) and working all that out? (I'm sure that is all done in loads, though, not each item separately.)
And strip and clean all of a bike's parts in sub 2 hours? I'm sure it's possible, but man that sounds like a pro operation there. Unless you really scored some nice vintage stuff (which this guy here may have, I'm not an expert), I would be surprised if you would calculate a 'true' wage as high as you just did.
It seems to be common knowledge (at least among some people), that you never really make too much money flipping old bikes, unless you really hit the jackpot. I think most of us just clean, fix, and flip bikes because we enjoy it, and the cash coming from the actual sales are probably just enough to 'keep us in bikes', so to speak. This analogy might be a bit uncouth, but to me it seems similar to the marijuana dealer who sells just enough grass to smoke as much as he wants to. : )
Of course, I'm simply speculating...
Last edited by awc380; 05-26-08 at 07:56 PM.