• How much is my bike worth?
• What size tires goes with my bike?
• What bike do I even have?
• Where can I get vintage parts and accessories?

You are not alone.

I receive many, many calls and emails regarding these questions and their answer is virtually always found on a website called Ebay. () You have probably heard of Ebay and it may seem odd that it has answers for Schwinn enthusiasts.
The truth however is that since thousands of vintage Schwinn bikes, parts and accessories are sold every week on Ebay, it is a goldmine of information.

When people sell things on Ebay they post pictures of what they are selling. Therefore there are thousands and thousands of images there that can help you figure out how much bikes like yours are selling for, what type bike you have (if you do not know), or what it is supposed to have as far as accessories go.

If you are unfamiliar with Ebay then keep reading and I will show you step by step how to find answers to your questions there.
If you are ready to jump in, use the search box to the right to search for something like “schwinn panther” or “schwinn seats”.

Guide to Using Ebay for Schwinn Research

Ebay is a place where normal people buy and sell an amazing assortment of things. Every time you go to Ebay there will be thousands of vintage bikes and parts available. Since these items have photos, there is a great wealth of knowledge and reference to be found. Let’s look at one of the questions I receive every day…

How much is my Schwinn worth?

To answer this question is rather easy. Your bike is worth is what people are willing to pay for it. You used to have to guess at this, but now you can know for sure what people are paying for a particular bike. If you have a Schwinn Stingray (as an example), you can (or the search box above) and search for “Schwinn Stingray” and here is a sample of what you will get…

You will get a list of items, with photos that have something to do with “Schwinn Stingrays”. You will find entire bikes, seats, handle bars, reflectors, etc.

In fact there is usually so much available that it isn’t always easy to find exactly what you want. Now let’s get back to the question “How much is my Schwinn Worth?”
So we went to Ebay, searched for “Schwinn Stingray” and now let’s make it a little more specific. Ebay let’s you sort things and when you are looking for the value of a particular type of bike a good place is to sort it by price. To do this, let’s use our Schwinn Stingray search and look to the top right hand of the page…

The red arrow above is pointing at the sort options.

A great way to find out how much a bike is worth is to see what the top price is for a really perfect bike, so we are going to choose “price: highest first” as shown to the right.

The reason we will do this is because the items that are highest priced are normally entire bikes in really great condition, higher priced items tend to have many photos, and it will also give us a “high-end” estimate of what Schwinns of this type are selling for.

Now that we have sorted it to “highest price” you may be surprised by what you see. Some of these are going for 2,500 dollars! (there are Schwinn that you wil find that go up to 10,000 dollars sometimes. Here is what it looks like now that we have sorted it…

To see the particulars of a certain bike just click the listing or the little photo and you will get all the details of the bike including photos, description and price details…

So now we have eight or nine photos to look at and compare to our bike (and this is just one listing, there are probably dozens of Schwinn Stingrays on Ebay at any given time).

Go to Ebay and play around and you will be pleasantly surprised by all that you can find out about your Vintage Schwinn bike.

Here are some Schwinn bikes that are currently on Ebay right now…

Schwinn Panther II

This page has every single image from vintage sources that I could find and I am quite proud of the results.

Included in this page is the year this model was first introduced and the year it was retired. There are original vintage catalog descriptions and specifications.

It is in short, what I hope is the most informative page about this Schwinn model ever made.

To add to the official Schwinn documentation references I also hope to get input from collectors.

After I make a page like this (I plan to make such a page for every Schwinn model) I hope to engage the community and get photos from them.

I will use the official forum for Schwinn bikes to call for photos.

For now, please visit my new Schwinn Panther 2 web page.

Here is the complete text and images from the 1964 Schwinn Catalog (the cover of which is pictured to the right – and the first year Sting-Rays were in a catalog!).

Notice this catalog is very easy to read, is all in one page, and is now a searchable index of Schwinn bicycles of 1964. What I mean by that is search engines can now index the full text of this catalog. Schwinn catalog scans and images have been kindly put on the web by several great people. But since search engine can not “read” images, the text of these catalogs was not available to them (or the people searching for such information).

In any case, I am making web versions of every Schwinn catalog I can. If you have scans of vintage Schwinn catalogs, please let me know so I can put the webversion up for other enthusiasts and collectors.

I have got my own copies of the following years (if I have begun working on the web versions there will be a link on the year) – 1949, 1955, 1960, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1980

The main index page for the catalogs will be my Schwinn Catalogs page.

There should be a new catalog every few days there so keep checking back.

These catalogs came out every year, and as such have become a year by year exhibition of what people were wearing.

It is hard not to smile when you see some of the old fashions in the pages of these vintage catalogs.

Especially from the 1960s and the 1970s…

So let us boldly go through some of the history of Schwinn bicycles and what women wore on Schwinns.

Let’s start with 1964…

1964

Ohh 1964, take me away like Calgon…

see the 1964 Schwinn catalog here

1965

1967

see the 1967 Schwinn catalog here

1972

1973

1974

I got an original sales brochure from 1960 and scanned it. I broke it down to a model by model display using the original text, prices and images from the document. This is what I hope to do with every year of Schwinn catalogs.

I learned quite a bit as I scanned these and went through every models description. I left the images pretty big and they can be clicked on to get even bigger.

Give it a look and let me know what you think.

1960 Schwinn catalog

I also finished the 1940s decade overview of Schwinn history with images from out of print books.

There is an overview of the decade at the following page…

1930-1939 Schwinn Bicycles

In adition to the overview of the decade, I am also including (where possible) a year by year, model by model description of the bikes. To see an example of this, look at the following page, which is for the year of 1933…

1933 Schwinn Models

As the days go by and as I get more source materials, I will be able to add more and more years.

The goal here is to have historical information for every model and every year of Schwinn Bicycles. I should be able to get at least the decade overviews done in the next week or so.

If you have any materials, information, or photos of vintage Schwinn bikes, please feel free to contact me so I can add them to the appropriate pages.

Thank you.

There were several different tanks made by Schwinn but today we are going to talk about the Slimline tank.
I have made a reference page about Schwinn slimline tanks using the items I have recently had shipped to me.

To see details about these tanks please see my Schwinn slimline tanks page.

This website will be unique among Schwinn resources as it will have model by model, year by year, descriptions of Schwinn bikes.

To see an example of what I am going for see the 1967 Schwinn Panther page which has many of the elements of what I consider to be a useful and complete description page.

I have received a few items (seats and slimline tanks mostly) and I have begun to photograph them. I have also bought several old Schwinn books and catalogs, which I will be scanning and using as references for bike model pages.

I have just begun using Ebay to get the parts and as I said, they are starting to come in. I look forward to reaching out to Schwinn enthusiasts and collectors to get more accurate data and more complete pages.

Please read my About page to get a feel of what I am doing and why.

I am also doing quick video to explain the goals of this website as well. Basically I want to document Schwinn bikes and accessories and do it in a pleasant and useful way that benefits the Schwinn community.

Please let me know what I can do better, I am open to suggestions.

Thanks,

Pat.

Thanks, I will be updating soon.