Some things about bicycles and nothing at all about anything that is important.

Why am I doing this?

Long story. I am a cyclist, mostly a commuter cyclist. I gave up cars several years ago because of my concern about returning ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. I also did not like the local public transportation system. But I still need to get around. So that left me with walking and cycling.

Occasionally a bicycle of mine would get stolen. This was always a disappointment. For me this was expensive, so I stopped buying new bicycles. I also did not want a bicycle that would attract thieves. So inexpensive used bicycles.

In looking for used bicycles I began to notice that there were bicycles just being thrown away. The environmentalist in me said “What a waste”. I tried to save bicycles from going to the land fill sites and dumps.

It turns out that almost all of the bicycles that are discarded are done so for a reason, they have problems and cannot be ridden. The problems with the bicycles require time and money and knowledge to get them working again. Some of the discarded bicycle look like they have been sitting in a garage for years waiting to be repaired, which never happened. For many people it is easiest to just dump the bicycle.

So I had to learn how to repair bicycles. It is much cheaper to do the repair work yourself.

Many of the discarded bicycles were old, ten years, twenty years, thirty years and older. Some no longer had decals and labels on them. Some had labels from brand names that I did not know who or what the brand was.

I was curious and wanted to know more about each of the bicycles.

Where can I find out about old bicycles?
Books and old catalogues, but these are hard to find. There was this new thing called the internet and a newer thing called “search engines”.

I would go to the internet and sometimes would find information about a bicycle or brand name. Sometimes I would not find any information about at bicycle brand. As time has gone by there is more and more information available on the internet and more information about old bicycles.

Websites about bicycles were put up and some by knowledgeable bicycle people.
However, I began to find that some information provided on the internet was incorrect. Even some of the experts on bicycles do occasionally give incorrect or misleading information.

So I found out that I needed to do my own research to verify information from whatever source. One method of verification was finding brand name catalogs which describe the models of bicycles that brand distributed, usually for a given year.

As I said before catalogues can be difficult to find. So I will try to make my own catalogues. I began to collect pictures of bicycle from the internet. Kijiji, Craigslist, gumtree, ebay and other sellers websites show all kinds of used bicycle for sale. There are several internet forums devoted to bicycles and there are many pictures and descriptions. I also purchased a camera to photograph bicycle that I saw day to day. Then I had to organize the images by brand name, model and year, into my own catalogues.

One difficulties I found was determining the year of a bicycle. I found out that some of the components on the bicycles have encoded date stamps from the manufacturer. These date stamps were used for inventory purposes but can be decoded to determine the date of manufacture.

Bicycle frames usually have a serial number. Some bicycle frame manufacturers also encode date of manufacture information in the serial number.

I have catalogued serial numbers for several manufacturers. For some manufacturers’ serial numbers I can not find a definite pattern. For some manufacturers’ serial numbers there are patterns and some patterns include date of manufacture information.

Now I can use the data collected for my catalogues to help determine the year of manufacture of a bicycle.

This is what I have done to get to this point. Why did I do it? Mostly for my own edification.

What content is in this website?

I started this website five years ago and made only two posts. I need to do more research and to collect and analyze more data, before writing anything. After five additional years I am a little more confident in what I present on this website.

The content is mostly about things that I have discovered for myself about older bicycles. Some of you and some other people may have already discovered these things previously, so there may not be anything new on this website.

This website is not necessarily about restoring or repairing bicycles. There are several good websites of that type around. I have not taken photographs to document bicycle restorations.

One note of caution. Do not take anything from this website as absolutely true or correct. You should verify for yourself any and all information from this website. I will try to be as correct about information as I can be, but sometimes I will get things wrong. This is the internet, and anyone can publish anything.