This bike started, as just the frame, from a bike shop that closed in 1960 because the owner died. Almost all the parts came from this bike shop. The original owners sister gave me all the bike stuff in the old shop if I cleaned it out. I just found stuff to fit from this stash. I think the only parts that didn’t come from this stash were the seat post, crank, BB and chainring. The front rim is double drop center and the rear rim is drop center. You can’t use rim brakes on these. It’s stripped of all unnecessary comfort features to save weight for racing, haha. She had already thrown out a lot of tools, which were small so she could throw them out and feel like she was cleaning it out. The bigger things like 20 frames, an abundance of wheels, rims and rotted tires were too much. Her brother was also a Harley dealer and I took all the HD stamped tools and put them in the shop attic. There was a cast iron HD truing stand I put in the attic. I called one of her nephews in Milwaukee and told him about the attic HD collection. Hopefully it can go to someone who can use them.
My father, who died last year at 88 years, was gifted a Schwinn like this from his parent's when he was a child in the 1940s, and when I was a kid in the 60s I had a similar bike as a hand-me down as my first bicycle which I learned to ride on. This was what most of us in the USA rode back in the 60s and earlier as kids.
Back in the day when these fat-tired bikes were mainstream, a lot more of the USA was rural than it is now. Where I grew up the only paved surface was a main two-lane highway, which of course we could not ride our bicycles on, we had to ride on the dirt curb, or dirt side roads, or just as likely off road in yards, fields and on paths through the woods. The tires on the automobiles, motorcycles and bicycles of this era reflected this, having as much width in their sidewall as they did in their tread, so they could go over rocks, bumps and holes and be reliable while cushioning the ride.
I remember going down a steep long hill on a dirt road with one of these bikes when I was very young, and when I pushed back on the pedals to activate the coaster brake I pushed myself off the back of the saddle and I landed on the rear tire, which then sucked my wedding tackle between the tire and frame, and left a big black mark burned into my arse from braking the bike to a stop in that way right through my cut-off shorts. We usually did not have fenders on the bikes because we either bent them while crashing, or were too lazy and/or incompetent to put them back on well after we took them off for some sort of repair work. We did not call them by any of the current fashionable or trendy names used by hipsters today, they were just bicycles, what there was laying around to ride in second-hand abundance.
Last summer the father of one of my childhood friends passed away at almost 100 years old, and he gave me a pre-WWII Schwinn "Excelsior" badged bike, that was his mother's when she was a child. I fixed it up a bit for my wife to ride, cleaning it's Morrow rear coaster hub and also having to re-paint it's rear rim as it was getting rusty. My wife was born in the early 50s and had bikes like this too, to ride out in the country by her parent's farm, when she was a kid, so now she gets to re-live that a bit. Here is a photo of the rear wheel I repaired, and one of my wife giving it a test ride up a street by our home;
