Thoughts on this nishiki vintage bike? Test ride it and fits good. It’s all ready to go and listing price is $200 but getting it half off.
I have another bike a cannondale quick and this bike will mainly serve long trips back and forth 20-40 miles round trip.
by cloudclimber24
6 Comments
Are you tall? That’s a large frame
Nice quality chromoly frame, Tange #2 is good stuff. Personally I’d ditch the springy seatpost though. Consider the clearance for tires as well. Doesn’t look like you can necessarily fit much more than the (looks like) 25mm tires already fitted.
That’s a nice vintage Japanese made steel bike and $100 is a great price although I can’t see the drivetrain from this angle. Make sure you’re ok with the gearing because it tends to be pretty steep on these old road bikes.
For $100 that’s pretty decent. Quality Tange #2 chromoly steel, and from what I recall the “Prestige” was a nicer mid-range model, so probably has Suntour Cyclone parts or similar.
The label on the wheel looks like what some of my older bikes have, Araya 700c, so you won’t be stuck using the obsolete 27″ standard.
Cool bike for sure! I’d spend $100 on it if I was looking for a cool old road bike. You’re mostly likely going to want to spend a little extra to get it tuned up.
Two things:
1: make sure it fits. That frame looks a little tall for most folks.
2: if you’re going to put 20-40 miles per day on it, I’d suggest holding out for something in a touring bike. They’re designed to be comfortable, you can throw your work shit in a pannier or whatever on the back, and tend to have easier gearing so that one hill doesn’t piss you off as much.
I like what I can see of it, for $100. It reminds me of my old Univega SporTour. You could easily swap to a smaller inner chainring to give you a better low-range gear, or convert it to a triple crank. I would also trade out the rear quick-release skewer for a Shimano skewer for really good clamping power, since the bike has horizontal dropouts (I’ve yanked axles forward before in horizontal dropouts).
If you were going to give it a lot of usage, you could find a used high-quality rear wheel with a Shimano cassette-type freehub (eliminating the axle-breakage tendency of a freewheel-type hub), and DT Swiss spokes for fatigue resistance. It should be easy to find a used low-usage vintage rear wheel like that.