Goodbye Raleigh Rocky II

Rocky, I barely knew you.

In an effort to reduce the bike fleet I’ve recently given the Rocky to someone else, a friend of a friend who needed a bike for transportation and couldn’t afford one.  I bought the bike last year at a police auction for the princely sum of $40.00 but never really rode it a lot.  Although I did like the way it handled it never did quite find its way into regular rotation (no pun intended).  I had plans of converting it into a DIY longtail bike, but in all honesty I knew it would be a long time before I would get around to that project.

Fixing this bike up to pass on was a learning experience in generosity. I initially thought that I would salvage several of the components  from the bike to recoup my costs and replace them with cheaper parts from my small stockpile.  This did not work so well. There were compatibility problems and I spend a lot of time trying to make the replacement parts work. In the end, I had to put most of the original parts back on the bike. This represented a lot of wasted time. If I had just tuned up the bike it likely would have taken me less than an hour to have the bike ready. Instead, it took more than 4 hours. In the future I will not let my cheapness overwhelm me.

This turned out not to reduce the bike fleet as I had planned. On Saturday, I scored a fantastic deal on an excellent vintage road bike that I simply could not pass up (more on this soon). Furthermore, on the same day, while volunteering at a ravine cleanup I found a partially dismantled mountain bike of decent quality. I’ll be reporting that one to the police to see if I can find its owner. Nonetheless, there seems to be some sort of Law of Conservation of Bikes at work.