Mike’s Bikes

1979 JC Penney Racer  [Shimano/Suntour/Italian & French 6-speed x 2] 56cm Tange single-butted 1020 Hi-Tensile 1/.7 gauge frame. Current weight w/pedals: 24.2 pounds Hand-cut & painted lugs on mail-order catalog bike. One thing to love about the 70s. The manufacturer remains a mystery, but similar lugs are seen on Centurions of the time. There is a "JAPAN" sticker on the seattube above the bottom bracket and serial# 9278565 (likely meaning 1978 manufacture) stamped adjacent on the downtube.  I scraped together $179 for this JC Penney catalog bike in the summer of 1979, then slowly spent three times that trying to turn it into one of those $700 Euro bikes I couldn't afford a few months earlier. Teenagers now do this with Civics, you know. It was originally equipped with Shimano Titleist/Selecta components (including centerpull brakes -- note the seatstay bridge) and weighed 28 pounds, but a season of mail-order deliveries later it was a 21-pound Pan-Euro mutt in sew