About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
A 1970s Team Fuji track frame in Fuji 331 double butted chrome molybdenum, built out of the Japanese track parts bin: Nitto, Sugino, Suzue, Araya and HKK.
Schwinn printed more paper than almost any American bicycle company and a great deal of it survives. This gallery gathers the catalog pages, dealer books and magazine advertisements that document the marque from a 1939 trade advertisement for racing components…
Founded in Chicago in 1895, Schwinn ran an extraordinary double life: a mass-production giant selling balloon-tire cruisers and electro-forged ten-speeds by the million, and a small hand-build shop producing Paramount racing frames and fillet-brazed lightweights that could stand against anything made in Europe. This timeline follows the company from the 1890s boom through the Wastyn Paramounts, the Sting-Ray, the bike boom it failed to capture, two bankruptcies and the 2023 closing of Waterford.
For most of the twentieth century Schwinn was simply the American bicycle, which is exactly why enthusiasts of classic lightweights tend to look past it. Behind the balloon-tire cruisers and the electro-forged Varsity sat a Chicago hand-build shop turning out Paramount racing frames, and a second line of fillet-brazed lightweights so badly marketed that almost nobody recognized what they were. This is the story of a company that built superb bicycles and could never quite bring itself to sell them.
Raleigh went from a twelve-person workshop on a Nottingham back street to the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world, and from there to a brand owned by a Dutch group under lender control. This is the full arc: Sturmey-Archer and the three-speed empire, the export trade, the Moulton fight, the Chopper, the four-man Ilkeston workshop whose frames won the 1980 Tour de France, and the long unwinding that ended manufacturing in Nottingham.
A practical, honest guide to dating a vintage Raleigh — the model ladder, the frame numbers that genuinely decode (and the ones that do not), the Sturmey-Archer and component date codes, and matching it to a catalogue.
Hobbs of Barbican built its reputation on Albert Hobbs’ conviction that “a cycle is as good as its frame,” and the timeline below traces the company from its 1930 founding through wartime relocation to a brief 1970s revival. Along the…
Bridgestone is best known worldwide as a tire giant, yet its bicycle story runs from tabi sandals in the 1920s to a cult-favorite American marketing operation in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to a Japan-only racing program that continues…
Bicycle companies faced a historical deletion around the time World War II hit, as the prevalence of automobiles and weight of war became overwhelming for manufacturers and racers alike. It was through this same period of hardship that North London’s…
Since the dawn of competitive bicycle racing, Italian frame builders have produced some of the world’s most painstakingly crafted machines, and of all the Italian brands desired by bicycle aficionados, vintage Masi bicycles turn up high or even highest on…
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