Hell, I have more time than money and like messing around with old bikes. I see all kinds of postings about how "I got this Zukiama Peerless handmade of unobtanium by one-armed singaporian virgin budist nuns in a French convent form the dumpster!" What dumpster is this? It sure aint MY dumpster. Or any trash can in my neighborhood. Where do you guys look? When do you prowl? What is the technique? What are the tactics?

Also, where are these "Thrift Stores" I keep hearing about? We have some "second hand" stores around but all they have is old cloths and baby toys.

Finally, how come Boston doesn;t have a "bike co-op"?

I believe this place is a bike co-op. And it has several locations in the B-Town area.

https://www.bikesnotbombs.org/

Does your town have a dump or transfer station? I find all mine at our "Stump Dump." Most are costume jewelry at best. But I've found a few diamonds in the rough. For the past year or more, very few bikes have been left. When gas prices jumped sky high, throw away bicycles dwindled.

Bikesnotbombs is a very cool place. I went there looking for a bottom bracket spindle marked "5" to convert a cottered Raleigh Super Course to cotterless crankset. As soon as I started to poorly describe what I was looking for, the young woman at the counter said she knew what I was looking for and pulled out an entire drawer of appropriate spindles. Wow!

Broadway Bikes in Cambridge might also serve your needs (though if it's just cheap bikes that get turned in and sold to you for very little, I'm not sure that's the place): https://broadwaybicycleschool.com/

And I'd have to say that in the Boston area, yard sales are likely your best bet for discovering a "find."

Neal

Most of it is just luck, but "curb side treasures" and garage sale finds are getting a little harder to come by. I remember seeing decent old road bikes at garage sales for $20 not that many years back, and nobody was exactly fighting over them. They now sell for $150+ on Craig's List within hours of being posted. Millions of bikes are bought in the U.S. each year, but they wind up sitting in garages, basements, and storage sheds collecting dust and rust. When their owners decide they want to "free up some space"...we want to be there. You can find out when bulk (trash) pick-up days are scheduled, and go around to see what you might find. I have heard of more than a few NYC antique dealers who had their established routes. You can check Craig's List and your local newspaper for garage sale listings in your area, set up an organized route to follow to get to as many as possible, and hope for the best. Neighborhood garage sales can often be really good. You can hit the church rummage sales, flea markets, and the like. You need to stay focused if you want to hit a few of them, and still do something else for the rest of the day. You also need to avoid buying stuff you don't need, just because it's cheap...unless it's something you could use, or resell, or somebody asked you to find one for them. You will run out of cash for the next sale where you might find something, and wind up with too much clutter. You can also talk to the LBS owner. See if he has any old junkers he wants to sell, or unload for free. He may have a bunch of old stuff he is going to toss that he'll give you. He needs the space, and may not want to resell these items because they are used or slightly damaged in some way. Certain things aren't worth their time as a "rule of thumb". They are worth our time, though. Don't forget that these guys are running a business, and try to stay on their "good side". Also, keep a bike carrier in your car trunk at all times...it comes in handy.

I frequent a trio of dumpsters behind the buildings-and-grounds department of a school near where I live. There is nothing special about them, except that they are somewhat secluded and people seem to bring bulky things there to toss them. I have found whole bicycles, pairs of wheels, and various other random parts there. I have no idea why these things end up in the dumpster; but they do, and when I'm around, they don't stay there very long.

I also stop for pretty much any bike put out for curbside pickup. Sometimes I take a few parts; sometimes I take the whole thing.

Google is your friend. You may have to drive a ways to find a good thrift store. There are many listed on google in your area. You will have to visit them all (or most of them) and "pre-qualify" ones you will return to. Map them out within an hour of your home. Of the 15 to 20 around here, only two of them ever have bikes. Thrift stores are a real crap shoot. And 90% of the time, they have nothing.

Garage sales: they have garage sales in the Boston area. Just look on Craigs List. I took a quick look and there are a dozen or more right now with bikes for sale this weekend. And fortunately, many of the ones with bikes will not list them in the ads. So that means even more bikes are available. You have to be willing to do some hunting. It can be the better part of a day scouting out garage sales.


The great deals are not free. The cost is mainly in the time and gas spent looking for the deal. Only the people willing to do the work are going to find the deals. How far are you willing to drive? How many hours/days will you put into going to garage sales? I pick up bikes at garage sales about every other week (I go to them every week), which means I totally strike out half the time. Which means you will spend all day looking and find nothing. And then another weekend, you will find four or five.... And you need to be ready to take all five.

The deals are not in my neighborhood.


So that's just a few ways to get bikes well below market. Its a lot of work. The lazy way is to just watch Craigs List and either pay full market or be ready to pounce immediately whenever a below market deal pops up (and luck out and beat out the other lazy people doing the same thing). The below market stuff will not last long on C/L, so there is no time to research it/get it later when it is convenient, etc. I have driven pretty far to snag some C/L deals.

Finding deals is a very active process. They do not just happen to pop up at convenient times. Usually it is the result of actively searching all the time.

I actively hunt for bikes and for better ways to hunt for bikes. I list and describe in detail how to find vintage road bicycles. I supply case examples of how I found many of the hundreds of bikes that have come my way in the past few years. These days, I find about a hundred or more bikes a year and I am not talking about entry level department store offerings. This year's best, so far, include a mid fifties Legnano, an early eighties Tomassini Prestige, a 1973 Raleigh International, a Gardin Anniversary, and an assortment of Peugeots, Torpados, Bottecchias and what else does not quickly come to mind.

If anyone is interested in having a look at my newest website, please send me an email and I will help you find your way there.

Mr. Grumpy,
It sounds like from their website that Bikes Not Bombs is slightly different from the Collective here in Santa Fe. Here you do all the work with a qualified bike mechanic to advise and help. The prices of the bikes are nowhere near the $325 starting price that BNB has. (Maybe 325 is a really good price in Boston.) They don't turn anybody away for inability to pay. The only way they would refuse you is if you refused to do the work yourself. Even then I've personally seen the mechanics do most if not all the work for the person if they just could not get it. But the new owner is always right there at least trying to do it. Chainbreakers Collective is just a really cool place with lots of great people. The energy there is very positive and supportive. They're going to help me rebuild a couple of wheels from some old Rigida rims that I have. I went to an lbs to get spokes and they told me the rims were worthless and tried to sell me some new wheels. But at CC, Owen said, "no problem, we can do that and it will be alot of fun".
They have a website but I think it is down right now while they work on it. I'll try to remember to post the site when it comes back up.
Maybe you should be the one to start a really cool collective!! I'll put you in touch with the folks who would know more about starting up if you are interested.
Happy trails-Kate

Ain't that the truth!
It's why you've got to grab a bike when you see it. If you don't, most likely it won't be there when you go back for it.

[QUOTE=mr,grumpy;9383635]

Also, where are these "Thrift Stores" I keep hearing about? We have some "second hand" stores around but all they have is old cloths and baby toys.

/QUOTE]

I've found stopping in thrift stores in the Boston area pretty disappointing.
I get bikes from
1) driving through neighborhoods on trash day - although I haven't picked one up this way in a while
2) Freecycle https://www.freecycle.org/ - never in Boston, Cambridge or Somerville. But out away from the city.
3) Craig's List. Again, it takes a lot of looking (and a boring job at a computer). Out away from the city people
sell bikes cheap. (Not a raging bargain, but because it is a bit too far from downtown this might sit for a while)
4) Yardsales at least 20 miles away from downtown.

I work a way outside of Boston (makes for a hell of a commute on bike) so it makes it easier for me.

The concept of literal dumpster diving reminds me of a skit from a late '70's Saturday Night Live in which the camera's begin to roll on Weekend Update and catches Chevy Chase on the phone with his girlfriend and you hear him explaining "you don't actually blow on it, that's just an expression".....

I doubt that many of us dress in a kevlar suit and dive into a dumpster of mixed trash. But I admit to having recovered some nice finds from 'beside' the dumpster, or 'about to be thrown' into the dumpster.

Last week I scored a mid '80's Scott Arapahoe mountain bike from beside the dumpster. The recycling/transfer center near me has a new policy to actually encourage people not to throw away good stuff. If you think someone might want it, you place it next to the dumpster, and if it isn't taken home in 4 hours, the staff tosses it in. How's that for a great policy?

My thrift shop find was a Raleigh Professional...

Other stuff hasn't been so "find" able - $35 all orginal (but rough) UO8, relatively cheap three speeds, and then my two "expensive" bikes - $100 Raleigh sports, and my $80 Univega

Over the years I've found the following bikes:

A Schwinn beach cruiser
A Huffy beach cruiser frame, and a few weeks later, a set of rims for it
An unridden 1959 Hercules three-speed. Still had tits on the petrified tires
A Nishiki hybrid that was the most poorly maintained & hardest ridden bike ever. Should have cannibilized it for parts & thrown the rest away. Fixed it up & sold it for $120.00. Still lost muny.

My dear old dad found a Viscount & Centurion from the late 70s curbside with a sign saying "free to good home" Both are lower end models, but the Centurion sold for $180.00 after a refurb. Realy a nice little bike for the college kid that bought it. Might keep the Viscount.

You need to have patience, foresight & the ability to grab fast when something appears. The supply of decent bikes with clueless owners is drying up. Now we have crappy bikes with optimistic owners.

This year I have found a bike leaning against a dumpster, two leaning against a post, several at townwide garage sales, several at thrift stores. At garage sales ask if they have any bikes they wanna get rid of and at thrift stores ask if they have any in the back.

errr, I suppose I could find some like that! There are some in the garge up the street, some on the balcony of the apartments near by and I can see some in the back yard nextdoor........

Yah I learned quickly to carry around bolt cutters to get some of them free that were stuck to the darned posts!

Time to refresh everyone's memory about www.shopgoodwill.com. This is essentially Goodwill Industries' own version of eBay, where they auction off some of their better items, nationwide. There have been some nice deals on this site. I bought my 1988 Peugeot P8 variant for $15.00 plus "shipping", coming to $16.65. The catch is, none of the Goodwill stores will ship bicycles. They are pickup only. That bike was in Port Huron, about a 90 minute drive. I have recently won four bikes totalling about $100.00 -- two Hercules, one violet 1972 Schwinn Suburban, and a Motobecane. The catch is, they are in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am in the Detroit, Michigan vicinity, about five hours one way. I'll be driving a long ways to get these bikes, but I figured I might spend as much time and gas driving around to yard sales.

That said, the Great Lakes region is a good place to find used bikes, although I can't claim anything like the exotic makes mentioned by the previous poster. I have found several bikes in the curbside trash, most of them only needing a good cleaning. I find a lot of 1970's Schwinns for $10 or less. As stated above, you could review the CL for Detroit or Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo and ask a local BF member about checking out the bikes and shipping them.

Okay, I went to a garage sale this morning (3-day sale... Fri-Sat-Sun). Would like to say I found the really exotic "vintage" bike for $10 that I went out looking for, but I didn't. I did wind up getting a bunch of brand-new hardware that I needed to buy...for about 2 cents on the dollar... sorry Home Depot!

I don't have a technique, per se. I'm lucky enough, however, to work at an art center (Visual Arts Center, RVA, free plug time-- visarts.org ) that just happens to be right next to a most excellent thrift store (Fan thrift, RVA-- more free plugs). I drop in for five minutes every day for a quick check. Over the years, I've found an old Albert Eisentraut bike (used as a team bike for a DC area store) with first gen Dura Ace, and a 1984 Trek 720 touring bike, both my size. And a Trek 710 with partial Campy, a C-record wheelset, a Trek 620 tourer, a Trek 560, a busted up UO8 with Retrofriction shifters and bar mount bottle cage, and various and sundry other parts, cycling clothing, and cycling related stuff-- spinervals videos, for example, several cycling related books, and the real prize, a copy of "No Hands-- The Rise and Fall of the Schwinn Bicycle Company" for a grand total of 2.98-- try finding that one for anywhere near that price.

The key is patience. It also helps to look for more stuff than just bikes-- over the years, at the same store, I've found countless records and CDs, books, and movies (last summer someone dropped off an incredible collection of movies from the twenties thru the sixties on VHS, and I bought over seventy of them). Most of my clothing came from there, including Blundstone and Redback boots and a brand new, never worn Cloudviel jacket ( a buck ninety eight, thanks very much).