Popular Vintage Bicycles: 1960s

Video Transcript

"So now we're moving up into the 1960s. 1960s, what became very popular was called a muscle bike. We call them muscle bikes today. A lot of people see a bike like this and they'll just call it a Stingray. This is a Schwinn Stingray. It actually is a Schwinn Stingray fastback which has a little narrower tires was a little lighter. But in the mid 60s bicycles started to have smaller wheels. These are twenty inch wheels whereas the middle weight that I showed you a minute ago and the balloon tire bike; those had big twenty six inch wheels. These have gone down to twenty inch wheels. This particular model has got twenty inch by one and three eights very narrow tire. This was not as cool as the other Stingrays that have a big fat back tire or maybe a small tire and a big tire. But its a good example of where bicycles were going by the 1960s. This is actually a 1970 model. A very strange thing about these is these big old shifters. I'm sure some people remember seeing these on bikes. It's for shifting your gears, but it's up on the top tube. They tried to make it look like a shifter on a hot rod or something. We'll talk more about those later."