i tell you what, give me her number and i'll break it to her easy. and then i'll give it to her hard. bad-a-bing!

http://www.leehotti.com/images/origi...img55255ti.jpg

OP never met or saw the girl, did he??? Diffcult to have a crush on her like that.

Anyway, another vote on telling her. You don't have much to tell her though, do you? Only that she is better off with a cheap prebuilt wheel then sinking money into building up a crappy rim. And that scoring a bike with a usable crank would have been nice.

you haven't heard her voice; she sounded like an angel! :D

OP never met or saw the girl, did he??? Diffcult to have a crush on her like that.

(Of course, I have a crush on her myself... To me, every girl who bikes (and wants to ride fixed!) is sexy by definition.)

Anyway, another vote on telling her. You don't have much to tell her though, do you? Only that she is better off with a cheap prebuilt wheel then sinking money into building up a crappy rim. And that scoring a bike with a usable crank would have been nice.

WTF? Is that why you offered to fix my bike?

You bastard.

I've seen a couple of those 70s Schwinns with freewheeling bottom brackets-- very odd! I don't remember exactly how it worked, but some Google magic turned up this mention of it: http://fredhaj.tripod.com/suburbanpage.html

Apparently it's called "The Shimano Front Freewheeling System (FFS)"
"The advantage to this arrangement is that it permits shifting while coasting. Another interesting feature is the Positron deraillier. With the Positron system, the indexing detents are built into the deraillier rather than in the shift levers."

Interesting-- the rear wheel is a sort of multi-gear fixed hub?

from an archived bikeforums post...

saw one of those this weekend.. those schwinns are freaking hokey. More things to break. help her out.

full report by next week...

i think the ffs stuff were mostly on the worst of the schwinns, i had trash picked one and that bike weighed like 45 pounds or something

Tell her

yea let her know that she is getting ****ed over with the hub.. help her out maybe you will get something in return :)

I'm so proud of you nerds.

all girls are *****, get out while you still can

Easy, everyone. Please keep the misogyny in check. Not that I'm completely innocent, but seriously.

tell her about it, tell her everything you know.

I would have no compunctions about warning anyone to bail on that deal regardless of their gender. She's being set up for a long complicated build that will likely leave her with an expensive crappy bike. Very likely the experience would sour her on fixed gear bikes in general. Tell her to get out while the getting is good. Help her figure out a good workable bike for a reasonable price, and the roads will be populated with one more happy fixed rider.

for instance, this thread might be something to leave out.

I would tell her she is getting ripped off. When it comes to things she doesn't know much about, it sucks to be worried that some ****er is going to rip her off. Obviously you can't do much more than that, it seems. If you get the chance to talk to her again, tell her (if you didn't already) what she will have in the end, try to explain how it won't really be right for her, and then tell her what she does need. That way when she is looking around at bike places, she'll know who is knowledgable and fair, and who isn't.

Those old Schwinn frames are heavy as ****. Crush or no crush, I think you ought to at least inform her of where she's about to end up and what could be done to make it work out much more desirably.

Find a garage sale ten speed bike with three-piece cranks. Pick up that Mavic CXP22/Formula wheelset for $130 or so and scare up a cog, lockring, and chain. Pretty much good to go.


Yes and no. I disassembled a trashed FFW bike a few months ago for scrap steel. It uses pretty much a standard one-piece steel crank, but the chainring that attaches to it has a set of bearings and a ratchet built into it, so you literally have a huge freewheel attached to your crank.

The rear sprockets are a stack of cogs sandwiched together with spacers between them. The hub-like thing they are all slid onto has teeth machined into it and each sprocket in the cluster has a very simple ratchet mechanism (a spring and a small block of metal to drop into the grooves on the shaft). Basically, the cogs on the rear hub can freewheel, but it takes a bit of force to get them to do so. This is apparently so you won't die if your shoelace or cuff gets in the moving chain.

I actually took the frame and BB/crankset from this bike out one night while drinking, and made it into a FFW singlespeed just for the hell of it. I had a ghetto 27" wheel with a suicide fixie hub and stuck some bars and a brake on it. You could coast going down the road, but the chain keeps moving and the chainring freewheels with a very loud clacking sound. I think I still have the frame in the garage somewhere. I should put it back together like this some time.

like our old friend!!!

I'm not sure who I'd rather "+1" here... So many brilliant minds at work here. Seriously!