Tricks for finding vintage bikes
 

Hello, just recently got into reconstructing Vintage bicycles. So, does anyone have good advice for finding nice Vintage road bikes at a cheap price? What are your thoughts on estate sales vs craigslist vs ebay?

Once upon a time, local Goodwill stores had some. Mid level C&V bikes that were dirty & had flat tires could be found for $9.95 and only needed clean,lube & adjust. Not really looking anymore, but I haven't seen anything good for a long time. Local yard or garage sales still seem to have a few, but lots of junk bikes out there.

Craigslist, estate sales, Facebook marketplace, friends, parents basemen ts . I always am looking for bikes on side of street, back streets, inside people's garages, backyards etc.

Craigslist and patience usually does it for me....And some luck...And being able to act quickly helps in most cases. I live in a "hot" market, and have done just fine finding some great bikes at great prices by that method. I've only bought one bike via the auction site, so I can't speak much to that. Most of what I see there is no deal, but some are often priced fairly.

My two cents are not to force the issue. From what I have found, the bikes will find you once you start looking and know what to look for. Patience.

If you have buckets of time on your hands, you can sometimes find some gem hidden in a craigslist post that has a subject line that says something simply like "Bikes" or "Old Bikes." Then in the pics you can see a beauty. But that's not so common.

In our town, the police don't auction off found or recovered stolen bikes that are unclaimed. The hire someone to come pick them up. I'm not sure what is done with them from there, but I heard that one LBS owner obtained many vintage bikes by having the guy stop buy and let him pick through the latest haul from the police. He's got some classic 70s Italian racers, plenty of old Schwinns from the 50s and 60s, and others.

You might call your local police station, find out what they do with unclaimed bikes. If there's someone getting them as I just described ask for their contact information, and give them a call.

There are at least half a dozen sites other than craigslist for buying used stuff. But when I check those and see something that appears to be a steal of a deal it's probably stolen.

I think the vintage scene has exploded the past ten years or so

I'm in the UK but you can still find the odd bargain on Gumtree and Car Boots and auto jumbles

Luck
 

Diligently looking and searching the usual outlets is not enough.......you need luck and sometimes I have too little of it!

Example 1: I get to the flea market early as people are unloading, no bikes to be seen. As I am leaving, see a "competitor" wheeling a beautiful C & V ride. "Where did you get that?" "Over in the first row....I just got here and the guy was taking it off his van. Said he forgot to put it out earlier!" :cry:

Example 2: Housing development yard sale with 2 entrances. I chose the wrong one apparently as I see 3, not 1, not 2, but 3 nice vintage bikes in the back of a truck as I get midway thru the development. Stopped to talk with the guy and he says he got them from a house located just as you turn into the development....the one I didn't choose. :cry::cry::cry:

Sometimes the vintage bike gods smile on you, and sometimes they don't.

Personally, I would follow [MENTION=139746]sloar[/MENTION] around. :)

Some of my better buys have been from my LBS. Not screaming deals, but more than fair. They take bikes on trade-in, fix them up and re-sell. If I happen to get there when they are still in rough shape, they are all too happy to have me take them at a discount so they don't have to bother with them.

I found an amazing trick that gets me incredible bikes for almost no money!

Just for the price of an angle grinder, I can have almost all the bikes I want!!!

almost all of my deals are from my local bike coop, We take bikes as donations and fix the lower end ones to give away to the less fortunate. The nicer ones we sell to pay for the bills. my Raliegh Gran Sport, Super Course, Carlton Franco-Suisse, and my latest Holdsworth Mistral all came from there. Granted they were in rough shape and the Holdsworth was just a frame. But it pays to volunteer there.

Here on BF! I have found many great frame deals on here !

Craigslist is another search area.

Word of mouth is an underused way to get interesting bikes. The drawback is that you have to weed through a fair amount of dept. store bikes - but there is the occasional gem.

Here on my block, everyone knows I work on bikes. But that's just local.

Befriend apartment building managers, for ex. They often have to clean out storage lockers where people leave bikes behind.

Search CL outside the bikes category. You'd be surprised how many bikes show up in the sporting goods, or general for sale categories. These often fly under the radar since they're somewhat misclassified.

Rummage sales and estate sales are obvious, but church and high school sales can be goldmines, often because the donors don't give any idea of value, and the folks that run the sale might not know anything about bikes.

And lastly, do good deeds for people. I've occasionally done minor work for folks around the neighborhood for free, and they often come to me selling their bikes when they buy a new one or move out.

I have a friend who makes a pretty good living off of acquiring and selling bikes. His key is volume, both in purchase from closed bike shops or selling as a wholesaler of used bikes. The bottom end is dead and top is going nuts.

Finally your secret revealed :)

Just keep looking. Bikes in my market are hard. Often overpriced. (People can't believe a vintage bike is only worth $100 in some cases.)

However, there are 3 auctions that I go to every year. One at the local university, one from the police, and one set up by bike people. You can almost always find a good deal at one of those.

Being near a university is sometimes good. Students don't really take care of their bikes, and you can often score a ridiculously dirty vintage bike with flat tires and handlebars flipped the wrong way for relatively cheap at the auction.

For example, there's a nice old schwinn on my local craigslist for a bit over $100 right now. If I were looking to fix up bikes, I'd buy that one. But I'm not, so I won't!

Another example. I also like to fix up vintage sewing machines. After looking on craigslist sporadically and never really seeing anything good, I setup an alert for "sewing machine" on craigslist (they email me when a new ad is posted with that in the title.) After doing that I've found half a dozen vintage machines and I've always been the first to respond.

Where do you park your bikes by the way? No reason I'm asking...

where I can see them :) but I think the frames are too big for you and you have nicer italians than my torpado, but would be a little nervous about the Miyata (1400 is pretty rare)

Different, not nicer. I dig your taste.

I was waiting for someone to mention the great number of his bike swaps.

I made google alerts for things I'm interested in. I wait for prices to fall below market value, because time is on my side. Search terms should look something like "Colnago Mexico site:newyork.craigslist.org/bia"

I could take you to a couple places that would blow your mind.

+1 on what Smontanaro said..

If anyone can find a deal, its Sloar.

You know the phrase "If you build it, they will come"?

Word is Sloar setup a bike repair stand in a small clearing in the middle of an Indiana cornfield...

I do something similar. (I use Google alerts for a bunch of non-bike-search stuff though.) I formulate Craigslist queries for nearby locales (generally for specific brands and sizes) and eBay queries for stuff I'm interested in or which overlap with my interests. So, for example, most of my seat tubes measure in the 61-63cm range, so I created a 60-64cm query on eBay. (Make sure to order the result by newest listing.) I actually don't use eBay or Craigslist for most of the alerts, but subscribe through inoreader.com. I also have an odd interest in non-Campy Italian parts, so I have a Modolo/Galli/Roto/Cambio Rino search that sometimes unearths some interesting stuff. Until my recent crash and the demise of my Trek 520, I also had a search setup for Dia-Compe cantilever brake parts.