(The age of the bike, not when I got them.)Įarly 70s Collegiate. But it doesn’t take long, as that’s what I grew up using!įor more photos of the Heavy Duti, see the flickr album below or click here. It takes a little while to get used to braking by backpedalling. There’s no cable clutter since the only brake is the coaster brake. I like the fact that I have a single-speed bike again, though this is way different than my last single-speed, the Centurion Le Mans 70’s road bike. There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of this bike. New chain and 22 tooth rear cog. With the 48/22 configuration, I have a gear inch of 57 inches, great for around town and not bad up hills.
New Schwalbe Fat Frank 26″ x 2.35″ tires.Brooks B67 saddle with Minnehaha barrel bag.Wide Wald steel cruiser bars with black “cork” grips.It didn’t need much done to it when I bought it, but I still made some changes: One that won’t get a lot of fussing over. It’s a bike meant to take a beating, one that I don’t need to fuss over. The Schwinn Heavy Duti fulfills the role of the fun bike, grocery getter, bar bike, occasional commuter. And it has the ID tags to prove it! So my industrial bike actually has real industrial heritage. Most of this has to do with frame construction: the older Schwinns were electroforged and used thick wall tubing, whereas my Taiwan-built Heavy Duti is TIG welded and uses lighter gauge tubing.Īs for my particular bike, I learned from the seller that this bike came from an abandoned aluminum mill up in Longview, Washington. And most importantly, it’s lighter! It is by no means a light bike, but it’s not as heavy as older cruisers that I’ve lifted.Unlike the earlier Heavy Dutis, this one’s frame is more straight/angled tubes, not the curved tubing on the old ones.It has braze-ons for a bottle cage and rear rack.Note that the seatpost isn’t the skinny ones you’d see on the older models. It uses metric parts and more modern sizings.And this Taiwanese built bike has advantages over older ones: Schwinn became a department store brand so little of its reputation remains today, though nostalgia for classic Schwinns runs strong.īecause it’s from the “Boulder” era, my Heavy Duti is less desirable/collectible than the Chicago-built versions. While moneywise they “turned things around”, they did this by selling cheap Chinese made bikes to the Walmarts of the world. But it was too little, too late, and in the early ’00s, Schwinn got bought by Pacific. The new Schwinn put up a valiant fight through the 90’s and launched a line of covetable made-in-America MTBs. It got bought by some investors and the HQ moved to Boulder. This is after the original Schwinn went bankrupt, and the Schwinn family lost control of the enterprise. My particular Heavy Duti is from the in-between era of Schwinn history: the 1990’s. When one came up for just $80 in the beginning of October 2014, I tested it out and bought it. A few had come up on Craigslist over the years, but they always wanted more than I wanted to pay at the time. It was the industrial grade cruiser in the line-up, offered off-and-on over the years. I had been interested in the Schwinn Heavy Duti for some time.
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