Maybe you’ve been there too: walking or riding or driving along, when your eyes were drawn to something bikey on the roadside. You, an enthusiastic rider, probably tend to notice things like this, and a number of questions instantaneously unspool in your mind. First up: does this abandoned bike have an owner? Then, in some order thereafter: is it any good? If it’s in a pile of rubbish waiting for pickup: is it worth salvaging? Finally: would it fit you or someone that you care about?
This is the first step down a long and winding road, but you quiet the voices in the back of your head saying that you A) have enough bikes already and B) even if you don’t, is this really an effective use of your time? Because here’s the thing: if you contort yourself enough there’s always a justification for another bike – whether it’s for you or anyone else – because bikes in most forms are a wonderful invention and this one could offer a slightly different perspective on that wonder.
So you pull over and quietly, almost guiltily, assess the merits of this roadside bicycle. You establish that it is, indeed, out waiting for non-destructible rubbish collection. Maybe you have to move some dried-up tins of paint or broken furniture out of the way to really get a grasp of what you’re dealing with here. The tyres are flat and cracked, because this is the only format such a bike comes in. There are cobwebs between the spokes. The chain is rusted into complicated shapes, and the seat has a big tear in it.
You can work with all of this. What you need to know is whether it’s got good bones. Shockingly often, it does.
You probably don’t need me to explain this to you, but there are distinct tiers to the Roadside Bike Find.
The lowliest: department store bikes. Seldom worth a second look; they will invariably weigh a ton, have rear suspension that bottoms out with every bump, and have parts on them made of cheese.
The middle tier: old road bikes. These can be worth your time, but beware of their high gears, their rickety brakes, their narrow tyre clearance and their downtube shifters. Also: people with a road bike to abandon are either keen about cycling now or were in the past and probably know the value of what they have, so the specimen that makes it to the curb is seldom great.
The top tier: mountain bikes (from, oh, let’s say 1985-1998). What you’re looking for here: rigid fork (if it has suspension, it will almost certainly be shot to hell). Rim brakes, because you are trying to build something easy and bombproof. A brand name that you’ve heard of.
The thing with this vintage of bike is that it normally has easy-to-work-with standards (like a threaded bottom bracket, probably with something square-taper inside it) and it’s been built tough. You might find something with an alloy frame, but typically in my experience, the kind of bike that people are pulling out from under their house to dump on the curb has a steel frame with a gaudy paintjob. As such, it looks distinctly dated compared to a modern mountain bike – and in many ways it is – but you, the discerning scavenger, recognise it as the retro-chic beauty it is. Bonus: because it was a pretty good bike of its era, it’s going to have a cassette rather than freewheel on its rear hub, and you’ve a good chance of getting lucky with some other non-weird parts: 27.2 mm seatpost, a threaded headset but with a tolerable level of rasp, and true wheels. This’ll do just fine.
So later that day, you assess your roadside find in the comfort of the garage and the real meditative joy begins. Methodically, you work your way over the bike, stripping off the parts you don’t want. You spin the handle of your chainbreaker to work loose a pin, feeling its resistance build and then suddenly release with a little snap like a square of chocolate. The grips feel disgusting, all gooey and warped, so you cut them off with a box cutter. You cut cables all over the bike to release the derailleurs from decades-long rictus. Maybe you bin the canti brakes, or maybe they’re worth your time to salvage.
Slowly the mysteries of this bike begin to reveal themselves: the little cottony bundles of cobweb in the brake bosses, the scratches of crashes and bike racks of years past, the speckles of rust on the bottle cage bolts. Some of these mementoes you will keep and some you won’t, but you have a begrudging respect for them all; you really can’t fault an old bike for coming with its own personality.
There are paths you can take here with your build: gather up whatever you’ve got lying around the garage and try and make it fit, send it off to be beautified with a period-correct build with a specialist, or get it up and running with a mix of new and old parts. There are puzzles to be solved; questions to be answered. Whether the bike needs mini-V brakes or regular direct-pull brakes or if you want to spend several eternities swearing at your cantis. Decrypting the gouges on the seatpost to figure out if it’s a 26.8 or a 27.2.
Your knowledge of your new-old bike expands – and maybe you think of it in such terms: as already part of the roost rather than something you’re merely tinkering with for shits and giggles – as you try to breathe new life into something old. By now you’ve been into bikes for long enough that they’re not just an object or a piece of equipment, but start having identifiable personalities and characters and souls.
Once you’ve rummaged through your drawers and shelves looking for spare parts to hang on your Roadside Bike, you’re starting to narrow in on a to-do/to-buy list. Then, time to decide whether it’s off to the local bike shop with the fancy new stuff, the local bike shop with the crates of dusty but decent parts ready for a second life, or the labyrinthine depths of the internet: AliExpress, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, online bike shops. You enjoy the process so the whole thing’s a joy, but this is where the real crux of it is: solving the puzzle and seeing something old be reborn.
And then, after all that – hours or weeks, cost-neutral or costly – it’s done: there’s a bike there that you’ve saved from the brink, reduce-reuse-recycle-revived. What its fate would’ve been otherwise isn’t entirely clear: maybe someone else like you would save it from the curb, build up their own interpretation of what this bike’s spirit is. Maybe it would’ve been loaded into the back of a big truck with gnashing jaws, spokes pinging and frame cracking as it bit down on the bike, crushed it into a cube of garbage and dumped it into landfill forever.
You’re glad that that didn’t happen. You have another bike in your life. Or you’ll give it to someone you love, so they can discover (or rediscover) the joy and independence of riding. Or maybe you’ll donate it to someone in need, giving them transport and autonomy. These are all good options. Great ones, even.
You look over the bike’s form, dated decals and all. There are the cables you ran from lever to brake; the chainring you skinned a knuckle on. There are the pedals you threaded in. The whole thing’s scratched and scuffed and objectively isn’t anything much – but in the glorious potential of this moment, it’s also kinda everything.
The author’s personal tally of roadside finds over the past couple of years (all within a few blocks from home)
– An Apollo Kosciuzko frameset with the most amazing blue marbled paint, about to be given to a friend who needs an old beater bike to ride with his kids
– A repair stand, also for the friend who’s about to get the Apollo
– A steel Shogun hybrid, mid-rebuild as a cheap and cheerful bike path bike for his wife (total spend: ~$120 AUD from the frameset)
– A perfectly true Easton Ascent II wheelset, now living on an old CX bike that will soon move to the family beach house for gravelly adventures
– A GT Palomar, the frame of which is pretty rough but from which some very nice wheels have been repurposed for Andy’s Apollo and some canti brakes have been polished and repurposed for the author’s Cannondale basket bike
– The bike his daughter first learnt to ride on (total spend: $20 [but with several nicer new bikes following, so a potential gateway to a lifetime of financial ruin])
– A fun orange folding bike, now living with his father (total spend: $20)
– The world’s worst folding bike, which will soon undergo destructive testing for #content (they can’t all be winners)
Did we do a good job with this story?