In a time when selling 10,000 of a particular bike was considered a success, the Sting-Ray sold 45,000 units in the first six months after its release. In 1972, Schwinn was making 6,000 bicycles a day with 2,000 workers in their Chicago plant and in 1974 an impressive 1.55 million Schwinns left the factory. Schwinn thrived through this hard time building a modern factory and buying other smaller bike firms; this allowed the company to engage in mass production of bikes that could be sold at lower prices. Schwinn fielded a mountain bike racing team in the United States where their team rider Ned Overend won two consecutive NORBA Mountain Biking National Championships for the team in 1986 and 1987. By the mid 1970’s Schwinn’s Super Sport and Sports Tourer/Superior weighed a few pounds more than comparably priced bicycles at a time when light weight was increasingly important to customers of quality bicycles. Fillet-brazed frames are also more costly to produce than lugged frames because they are made by hand and require hand finishing.
As was the bicycle French cyclist Bernard Thévenet rode to victory in the 1975 and 1977 Tours de France. British industrial engineer Benjamin Bowden designed a futuristic bicycle for the “Britain Can Make It” expedition in 1946. Bowden’s bike was aerodynamic, used an extended fender system to cover all its moving parts, made of fibreglass, and used a unique shaft-drive system. In 1903, Henri Desgrange and his colleague Géo Lefèvre organized a long-distance race through France to boost sales for Desgrange’s sports magazine, L’Auto; the 19-day race would be the first ever Tour de France. In an effort to make bicycling accessible to more would-be riders, John Kemp Starley—the same man behind the Ariel penny farthing—created the Rover in 1885 in Coventry, England.
Giant Bikeswent from strength to strength – producing over one million bikes in 1986 and supplyingSchwinnwith 80 per cent of their bicycle inventory. At the beginning of the eighties, the factory in Taiwan was sending 100,000 bikes back to America per year. Keep up with the issues, companies and people that matter most to business in the Milwaukee metro area. The company is preparing to use Reynolds 953, a next-generation high-performance stainless steel with corrosion resistance similar to titanium, Schwinn said. The company started implementing elements of lean manufacturing about two years ago. “I think we will get some significant improvements in productivity,” he said.
Upon his arrival in America, Schwinn quickly found work with the Hill Cycle Manufacturing Company and rose readily to the level of plant manager. He managed the plant for two years while he searched for the time, place and money schwinn bicycles to launch his own venture. This he found with the collaboration of another successful German immigrant, Adolf Arnold. According to Pridmore and Hurd, Arnold invested $75,000 in the venture, and Schwinn offered his expertise.
At the close of the 1920s, the stock market crash decimated the American motorcycle industry, taking Excelsior-Henderson with it. With no buyers, Excelsior-Henderson motorcycles were discontinued in 1931. W. Schwinn returned to Chicago and in 1933 introduced the Schwinn B-10E Motorbike, actually a youth’s bicycle designed to imitate a motorcycle.
His ambitions were a tad too big for the old country, however, and in choosing his next move, he carefully calculated Chicago as the ideal destination. For all its associations with the 1950s and ‘60s, though, Schwinn’s mid-century heyday mongoose bmx bike was really just an easy downhill glide after five decades of determined, non-stop pedaling. Crew-cutted Eisenhower kiddos had Schwinns on their Christmas lists because Schwinn was already the name their parents knew and respected.