Vintage Bicycles: Yard Sales & Flea Markets

Video transcription

Okay, so say by this time you've decided okay, I want a vintage bicycle. I want to ride one, or I want to have a bike like I had as a kid. I want to clean it up, and and hang it up in my basement. Well, what if you don't have one. You don't have a bike, you're going to look for a bike. There's several places to look for a a good vintage bicycle. Yard sales are terrific. Generally, you'll get a good bike at a good price, because somebody had it in their basement, just as, you know many people do, and people don't see any value in the bike. It looks rough, it looks like too much work to do anything with, so they sell it at a yard sale for five or ten dollars. You could end up with a bike that's worth hundreds of dollars that way, and certainly you can end up with a bike that you can enjoy riding. Now flea markets are a little different. Sometimes people that are selling at a flea market, every item they have they think is gold. They'll have a bicycle that they think is worth a lot of money, because they saw on the Internet a similar bike is worth a lot. You kind of have to be careful. Take this bike here. It's a bike I purchased recently, and I saw it at a flea market. I got very excited, and I grabbed it, but as I'll show you later, it had some things about it that are completely incorrect. It's a Schwinn Stingray. The year is 1971, I'll talk about how you can see check serial numbers, but it's got some problems, and it's not as valuable as I thought, and in the end, I ended up overpaying for this bike. And I've been doing this for many years, and I still sometimes make this mistake. You get caught up, you get a little excited, and you end up with something that is not what you thought it was.