As best my wife can recall, the last time she used that bike, my young daughter rode on the back.
Said daughter is turning 24 this year.
So it’s been sitting quite a while, unused, on our screen porch.
But with a little cleanup, new rubber all around, brake pads, a little WD-40, and chucking the moldy backpacks and rusty baskets, voilà:
Not bad for a bicycle that’s more than a quarter-century old.
Still funky after all these years.
While we’re at it.
The four most expensive words in repairs.
I knew that all the rubber items on the bike had to be replaced, just to get it back on the road.
Only after I got that done did all the other problems begin to surface. Problems that I’m going to have my local bike shop (Bikes@Vienna) fix.
Why don’t I fix the rest of the problems myself? Here’s my answer:
Source: BikeE riders’ group on Facebook.
Among the maintenance this bike needs is to have the three-speed axle pictured above taken apart, cleaned, lubed. And then, most importantly, not merely put back together, but put back together correctly.
I’m not up for rebuilding that. Among other things, that particular three-speed rear hub is more-or-less a priceless family heirloom. The manufacturer stopped making those hubs about 20 years ago. New parts have been unavailable for a decade and a half now. And it’s the only hub that will work with this bicycle without significant modification to the bike’s current setup.
This bike is so old …
… that it predates e-bikes, that is, bikes powered by electricity. Which makes the brand name — BikeE — a real handicap when it comes to looking for parts on the internet. But circa 1998 or so, when this was sold, a) internet use by the general public was just a few years old, and b) nobody could possibly have guessed that they would ever make batteries energy-dense enough to be used to power bicycles. Let alone cars.
… that it came with an incandescent bike headlight powered by “C” cells. Among the stuff that got packed away with the bike was a (then) top-of-the-line CatEye bike headlight. Back in the day, they dealt with the inefficiency of incandescent light bulbs by using big batteries. I can’t recall the last device I bought that used anything but AA or AAA (or even smaller) cells.
… that the company that made it went bankrupt more than 20 years ago. Once upon a time, BikeE was the largest U.S. seller of recumbent bikes (per this reference). But they went out of business abruptly in 2002, after some product recalls.
And yet, this bike remains a good design. The big advantage of this bike is comfort. It’s a semi-recumbent bike. Sitting on it is about like sitting in a well-padded office chair. Your butt is further cushioned by an air-shock suspension. It is about as easy on your body as bicycling gets.
And most of the wear-and-tear parts remain available. One of the joys of working on bicycles, as opposed to appliances, is that most of the parts are standardized and still available. Everything on the bike frame was made to be replaced. And everything can be replaced by anyone with an average aptitude for mechanical repairs, and a few simple hand tools.
Conclusion
My wife and I have owned a pair of BikeEs for a quarter-century now.
They seemed expensive at the time, but in hindsight, they were a good investment. Cheaper than a heart attack, for sure. I’ve used mine regularly, barring injuries, and it’s really the only consistent source of exercise I’ve had for the past quarter-century.
My wife’s BikeE, by contrast, got mothballed somewhere around 15 years ago. Now she has decided to start riding again, and bringing that elderly bike back to road-worthy condition wasn’t that hard at all.
Now all I have to do is (have my bike shop) catch up on 25 year’s worth of deferred maintenance.
