In an effort to enjoy my environs a little more and become more active, I decided to get a bike. Nothing hardcore and nothing expensive…enter craigslist.  The website has treated me well in the past (I’ve bought and sold numerous pieces of furniture and even sold my car on it).  So a trip to Campbell and $85 later, I am now a proud owner of this beauty:

I’m pretty happy about it.  The biggest change is adjusting to pedal-based brakes.  Looks like I have a reason to use bike vs. car now! ;)

Curiosity got me wondering what kind of bike it is.  The owner listed it as “women’s cruiser” and got it second-hand a while ago.  It doesn’t have any branding on it (it’s definitely a custom paint job).

So where better to figure out the identity of my newest mode of transportation than the Internet?  My first stop was GIS (sorry, Yahoo!, but ever since you forced Flickr into your image results I’ve steered clear).  It helped me narrow things down…sort of.  Most of the results were for bikes currently on the market, AKA the latest version.  Same deal for brand websites (Huffy, Schwinn).  Here, though, was a nice set of vintage bikes listed out.  I also figured eBay might help.  Anyways, these are some of my final candidates:

West Port:

Beach Comber:

Cranbrook:

All of these have chain protectors and mine doesn’t.  Mine also doesn’t have wheel protectors (like the Cranbrook does).  So who knows.

Last year for our Design of Online Communities class, we did a group project suggesting a niche community for antiques lovers basically for them to show off their latest finds and get more information about them.  So yeah, if that community existed maybe I could figure out my mystery.  Then again, I quit investigating in favor of write a blog post about it, so there could very well be a group of bike enthusiasts out there ready to do just that.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 6:50 am and is filed under leisure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.