I scoped out this old cruiser hanging up on the wall of my in-laws retirement RV clubhouse. I saw that funky front tranny & personally have never even seen anything like it. I looked through my "American Bicycle" book & found nothing like it.












b.

WOW!! looks pretty cool!! I cant really tell what it is but, the print on the seat looks like old schwinn!!! I know one thing,, those have to be the first set of flight cranks LOL !!! notice the pinch bolt !!! J/K Looks pretty cool !!!

cant you just rip it off the wall!!!!! look at the moped gear box on that thing ,,where do we find this stuff!!

Schwinn ''Heavy Duty'' My Guess..??

Looks like a Schwinn Wasp with some interesting mods. 64 Sting Ray bars and the strangest gear box I have ever seen. Wow. That's too cool. I have to show this one to the guys at Schwinnbike.com .

For some reason I am remembering a gearbox that allows you to pedal forwards or backwards with a twist of the grip.

I think I had one of those given to me when I was way too small to ride it. It was a 2 or 3 speed on the grip. It was for hill country bikes I betcha because thats where mine came from. Very low gearing I remember. The only reason I could ride it at all was it was a girls bike. I might have been 6 yo at that time.

Dude...it has a transmission!

If you can find me the rest of the Patent numbers that are cast into the housing of the transmission I can tell you exactly what it did & post any of the more interesting images of the patent here , looks like there is a whole lotta stuff happening inside that cast aluminium housing.

The numbers I can make out are 3,727,4XY , I need those last 2 shielded numbers , even getting X would let me find it quick enough....
An educated guess is thats the PN was issued post WW2, probably in the mid 1950's , it must have had some "unique feature" inside of it , otherwise there would not have been a patent number issued for it

The early single pinch flite cranks attached to the mystery torque converter look pretty cool as well


JB

That looke a schwinn with a transmission thing-a- ma-jigger! It has a built in watch-ma-callit next to the doo-hicky!Other than that, It may be a hell-if-I-no!

Heavy Duty over at Schwinn said. "The front sprocket is a Dana three speed transmission. I have one, but haven't installed it on anything yet. It has a sprocket about the same size as the back, hidden behind the case. Very heavy duty unit, with a two cable shifting system. I have not ridden with it yet, to see how the ratios are, and how a larger rear sprocket would affect it. They were made in the 71-73 time period I believe.,,,,HD"

Hhmm, thanks guys.

Next year when I go back down I might be able to talk the owner into a trade, if the bike is worth saving & restoring. There are a few other cruisers hanging from the rafters but nothing that really caught my eye. They were cool though.


b.

Thats it!! A Dana!! Somewhere on it is a diamond emblem with the word Dana inside.