Schwinn 'Stingray' revival

Westtown Willy

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As a kid in the early 70’s the bike to have was the Schwinn Stingray, particularly with the 5 speed shifter mounted right on the top tube & the quintessential rear tire, the slick. What a cool ass bike that was. As much as I wanted one, my old man ended up getting me the slightly cheaper (literally by two bucks, I looked it up) & less desirable ‘Typhoon’. It was the same frame & all around nearly the same bike as the one-speed ‘coaster’ version of the Stingray except it did not have the much sought after banana seat & butterfly handlebars that came stock on the Stingray. I must’ve bore-assed him plenty because eventually we retrofitted the seat & handlebars so my bike looked like a Stingray, I ripped the chain guard off to get rid of the ‘Typhoon’ moniker, dumbass that I was.

Fast forward, I don’t know, 25 years, my parents sell the house & call me up & say hey, do you want your old bike, if so come & grab it otherwise it’s going in the dumpster. I’m not all that sentimental & have very little from my childhood, but this bike was really the first real thing I can remember really wanting & then having for many years, y’all know what I’m talking about, that thing that you associate some of your best memories with… so I went & grabbed it & stuck it up in the loft of my garage where its been collecting dust since the late 90’s.

Fast forward again to maybe a week or two ago when a Stingray came up in my Book of Faces Marketplace feed. Normally it’s packed with Jeeps, bbq grills, pizza ovens & some other random bullshit, but when I saw the bike I naturally clicked on it. You know what happened next, every day there are 50 old Schwinn bikes on there, so I’ve been drooling over these old things day after day. Tonight I started thinking about even picking one up, an actual Stingray. They can be had, depending on condition, from a few hundred bucks to well over a grand & more. As I started thinking it through it hit me, I practically already have one & it’s a helluva lot more valuable to me than any of these others I could buy. Granted it’s in horrific condition but it’s the same one my little 6 year old ass rode for the first time 50 years ago, why not pull it out & git’r back on the road.

I’m no bike mechanic but it seems sound, brake still works & everything is straight. I’d need to clean it & paint it, it was ‘Campus Green’ when I got it, I’d like to find that paint & bring it back to original, & I’d also have to find a good replacement rear tire, and I’d like it to be a slick, as much as the old man tried to help me back in the day make it look like a Stingray, it was always missing the slick… Front tire is also basically crispy & rotted off. Probably needs a new mounting bracket for the rear of the seat, this one is bent up down below where it connects to the frame & I’d need to raise it to its highest position to be able to ride it. It’s also missing a pedal.

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow & the Hefeweizens have worn off this thing will go back up into the loft for another 25 years, but maybe not, I feel like a new project is afoot.

Anyone ever do anything like this?


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I do remember those. I don’t remember if I had one or a friend did but , I do remember it was green I believe. Pretty cool for sure.
 
I had the orange model titled “orange crate” . Five speed stick shift and slick rear tire. I then went to the “uniroyal” stretch frame and five speed stick and a manual hand brake. No idea why anyone would want a hand brake on on a bicycle but hey , I had one. Cool memories. Thanks For sharing.
 
Ohhh, man...

I wish I still had my chrome Schwinn Stingray springer forks. I actually owned two sets of them until somewhat recently. At one point, I had 26 bikes in my cellar. I think I'm down to 21-ish? Don't remember. Schwinn, Colsen, Elgin, Raleigh, Worksman, Monark...I have a few. Is yours a 20"? It almost looks like a 24", though that just might be an optical illusion.

Looking forward to seeing what transpires, here! (y)
 
My first “thing” I absolutely HAD to have was a Tamiya Blackfoot. Finally got one for Christmas one year, I think I was about 12. I still have it, I’ve looked at restoring it a few times now. One of these days, my wife is going to leave to visit her sister or something. I’ll have a few too many beers, and I’ll get it out and make a list. Then I’ll spend far too much money on eBay buying parts to restore it. I’ll finish it, play with it for a couple weeks, then it will go back into the attic.
 
My first “thing” I absolutely HAD to have was a Tamiya Blackfoot. Finally got one for Christmas one year, I think I was about 12. I still have it, I’ve looked at restoring it a few times now. One of these days, my wife is going to leave to visit her sister or something. I’ll have a few too many beers, and I’ll get it out and make a list. Then I’ll spend far too much money on eBay buying parts to restore it. I’ll finish it, play with it for a couple weeks, then it will go back into the attic.

Had to look up what that is. Cool!
 
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Is yours a 20"? It almost looks like a 24", though that just might be an optical illusion.

it's a 20, small ass bike, fortunately I haven't grown much since I retired this thing at 11 or 12 years old so I think I'll still be able to ride it :ROFLMAO:

Ah yes, butterfly handlebars and a banana (some said "Bonanza") seat. The cool kids had a tall sissy bar.

Sissy Bar! Ha, I completely forgot what it was called, in my description I called it a bracket hahaha. But yea, one of my buddies had the really high one like below.

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I've been scouring the internet & it looks like all the parts are readily available so I'm moving forward on this project; apparently there's no shortage of weirdos like me keeping this industry alive. I don't want to go nuts with it, just get it back to factory color & mechanically sound with new rubber, I think I'll need a new sissy bar as mine is a bit hosed, the old man didn't buy the proper brackets but fabricated some that never quite fit right, never tight either.

Also considering a new 'campus green' banana seat, I still have the original green hand grips on there. Shooting for something like this sans fenders & chain guard:

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Edit: so I'm $200 deep into this brilliant idea already, that gets me the following:

Rear slick tire with inner tube (to replace the 50 year old stock tire)
Front brick tire with inner tube (to replace the 50 year old stock tire)
30 inch sissy bar (to replace the 24 inch bent one)
Proper sissy bar brackets (to replace the homemade ones)
15 inch seat tube (to replace the 9 inch already maxed out & too short one)
Vintage 'block' pedals (to replace the beat one & missing other)

As far as paint goes, it's rough sledding finding the exact paint, as far as I can tell only one company makes it & to do it right it's looking like around $200, fuck that, this bike is already a butcher job Stingray knockoff so being precise isn't important enough to justify that expense so I'll opt for a rattle can of some other close-is-good-enough color!
 
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SOB. .been several post draggin up memories of the childhood i try to forget.

my grandfather got me 1 of these brand new for my 12th birthday...for some reason i think/thought it was a 5spd. blue with the big sissy bar. coolest bike i'd ever seen.
never got to ride it, my stepfather sold it at the flea market for 15$ that next wkend.
 
As far as paint goes, it's rough sledding finding the exact paint, as far as I can tell only one company makes it & to do it right it's looking like around $200, fuck that,
Was there ever a car painted in a color anywhere close? A spray can of automotive color match paint isn't too expensive.
 
I had the orange model titled “orange crate” . Five speed stick shift and slick rear tire. I then went to the “uniroyal” stretch frame and five speed stick and a manual hand brake. No idea why anyone would want a hand brake on on a bicycle but hey , I had one. Cool memories. Thanks For sharing.

Ok so down the rabbit hole I went. Not my bike but same cockpit.
Really! Who needs a parking brake on a bicycle……apparently I did

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I never had a Stingray, though I lusted after a Schwinn Lemon Peeler. Dad said, "No way in Hell was he paying almost $100 for a bike. Neither are you. No bike is worth that much." If he only knew...

My first new bike was a 26" Evans. Red with white rims and black pin stripes. To a 7 year old kid in 1963, it was gorgeous. By 1968, it had lost its' fenders, chain guard, been painted Pepsi Blue, had a banana seat, and what you call butterfly bars, we called Angel Wings. Once I started to use that bike for 'transportation', ie, ride to my then girlfriends house 15 miles away, I came to loathe that banana seat. Popping a wheelie and losing the front wheel didn't endear itself to me, either.

In 1970, I got my first 10 speed, with a real leather saddle. 52 years later, I still have that bike. The Evans is long gone. I still have that saddle, too, though it's been on a different bike since 1990. That bike and I raced in France in 1991, where I learned quickly that my family would starve if we depended on my racing abilities.

Anyway, guys restoring old bikes of your youth, besides eBay, Market Place, CL, and Amazon, check around for bicycle swap meets in your area. They are a thing. There's a large one in Madison, WI every January, a not as large one in St. Charles, IL in February, and many local ones all over the place. Be prepared to pay through the nose, though, for NOS Schwinn parts. You will pay through the nose and take it in the rear for NOS Stingray parts. Used parts are always a better deal and the sellers are usually willing to haggle.

Have a ball.
 
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been a few of these up on FB recently, they are goin for 100-300 depending on condition.
 
As a kid in the late 60ies early 70ies I venture into the local Schwinn dealer to dream. Crazy by todays standards as the store or I'll say show room was like entering a high dollar exotic motorcycle collector show room. A handful of bikes lined up on the floor like and several on a carpeted, tilted shelf along the wall with some blingy ambiance lighting. Every kids dream to won a Schwinn. I always had to settle with a Huffy.
 
As a kid in the late 60ies early 70ies I venture into the local Schwinn dealer to dream. Crazy by todays standards as the store or I'll say show room was like entering a high dollar exotic motorcycle collector show room. A handful of bikes lined up on the floor like and several on a carpeted, tilted shelf along the wall with some blingy ambiance lighting. Every kids dream to won a Schwinn. I always had to settle with a Huffy.

We had our neighborhood Schwinn dealer too, what a place, I can still remember the smell which was mainly the rubber from the tires. I never ended up with a Huffy, my buddy across the back yard did & we tormented him because of it :ROFLMAO:, & my older brother got shafted with a 'Murray' which may have been worse than the Huffy.

You want to talk about a high dollar exotic show room, yesterday as I was cleaning the wheels I noticed that the front was missing a spoke, not sure how I missed it all this time & I have no idea what ever happened to it. Anyway I'm way out of the loop on bikes these days so I googled local bike shops & found one a couple miles from my house, tossed the wheel into the TJ & headed over. The girl behind the counter looked at it & said yea, I have a spoke back there, they're $2.00 each. She then looked at me again & said "why don't I just put it on for you", man I must really look pathetic hahaha, but I wasn't going to object. So while she was installing that I was poking around the store. I cannot recall the last bike shop I was in but I may as well have been on a different planet. These things look more like space ships than bikes, at least half the store was 'electric' bikes & one in particular was over $6,000 o_O. I nearly shit myself. I was listening to the kid talk to a customer about some of the bikes & honestly it was a different language, terms I'd never heard of & so forth along with prices that could choke a pig.

Anyway the girl finished up & handed me back my relic & only charged me the two bucks, I told her the story of what I was doing & she just smiled. I was nonetheless happy to get out of there, the world is a dramatically different place these days even in bike shops.
 
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This thread took me back to a very happy place. My Dad bought me one in 1969 and I road that bike everywhere. My Mom used to get mad at me for taking her cloths pins, while my Dad was angry because his deck of cards kept disappearing. I'm guessing you know what both were used for! :D
 
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This thread took me back to a very happy place. My Dad bought me one in 1969 and I road that bike everywhere. My Mom used to get mad at me for taking her cloths pins, while my Dad was angry because his deck of cards kept disappearing. I'm guessing you know what both were used for! :D

ha, I can still hear that sound; perhaps one of those clothes pins took out my spoke :LOL:. Yea I rode mine to death, the fact that it's still straight & intact is testament to how well these things were built back then (or maybe because I weighed 62lbs soaking wet). When I was cleaning the frame over the weekend I was marveling at the design & the finish, the thing is amazing. I also realized that I still had the original seat & buckhorn handlebars that came on the Typhoon, not that I'm putting them on but it was a cool find.

I've made progress, frame is clean and primer coats are on. I found a reasonable facsimile from Duplicolor called 'leaf green', ordered from Bezos, all the other various parts I ordered are in various stages of shipment. Shouldn't be long before I've wrapped up this foray into the deep past. Not really sure what I'll do with it once it's done, after a test ride of course. We'll see, I am pretty damn excited about it
 
ha, I can still hear that sound; perhaps one of those clothes pins took out my spoke :LOL:. Yea I rode mine to death, the fact that it's still straight & intact is testament to how well these things were built back then (or maybe because I weighed 62lbs soaking wet). When I was cleaning the frame over the weekend I was marveling at the design & the finish, the thing is amazing. I also realized that I still had the original seat & buckhorn handlebars that came on the Typhoon, not that I'm putting them on but it was a cool find.

I've made progress, frame is clean and primer coats are on. I found a reasonable facsimile from Duplicolor called 'leaf green', ordered from Bezos, all the other various parts I ordered are in various stages of shipment. Shouldn't be long before I've wrapped up this foray into the deep past. Not really sure what I'll do with it once it's done, after a test ride of course. We'll see, I am pretty damn excited about it

I wish I still had mine, because it would become wall art in the basement. Although I don't have the bike, I do still have my original GE 8 transistor radio that went riding with me!