The worst bike ever made or that you have owned

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Gunk

Guru
Location
Oxford
Raleigh Hustler was the worst bike I ever owned, looked like a racing bike but weighed a ton and had a 3 speed hub. Loathsome thing.
 

Saluki

World class procrastinator
I had a, much hated, Raleigh Twenty. To be fair, it wasn’t a terrible bike but I had saved my pocket money for a year and worked weekends in my Dad’s bike shop for a Puch Pacemaker. He presented me with the Raleigh. Not happy.

The actual worst bike was a freebie, with a gym membership. Apollo XC-26 Mountain BSO. Just bloody horrible.
 
Location
London
I had a, much hated, Raleigh Twenty. To be fair, it wasn’t a terrible bike but I had saved my pocket money for a year and worked weekends in my Dad’s bike shop for a Puch Pacemaker. He presented me with the Raleigh. Not happy.
Sounds like child exploitation to me.
These days you could have exposed him on social media - had him run out of town.
 

Saluki

World class procrastinator
Sounds like child exploitation to me.
These days you could have exposed him on social media - had him run out of town.
I was pretty peeved off. The difference between pocket money & ‘shop earnings’ was to be my 11th birthday present bike. I had to do my cycling proficiency on that thing. Still scarred, to this day. Horrible, ugly, dark brown thing.
 

mustang1

Guru
Location
London, UK
Circa 1994 my parents bought me a oyster coloured road/touring bike from Halfords. I would love to find out the name of it but alas that has eluded me but I'm Dawes Gold Wing rings a bell. Checking Dawes' history however has revealed nothing with a bike of that name so it might be Halfords' own brand: Halfords Gold Wing. Alas, I cannot find information about that either and whenever I'm inclined to search for it, I always get many ages about a Honda....

Anyway, this bike had downtube friction shifters and full mudguards. I used to ride in a group of 3 including me. The other two guys had racing style road bike whereas I was on a touring/relaxed style model with full size mudguards. I used to always beat them up a steep hill. I remember putting it into 4th gear and mashing the pedals until I the cadence was high enough to start spinning.

I once met a hot girl who was riding along so went up beside her (ha, no shame in my teens!) and started chatting to her. She told me her and her boyfriend were cycling the world and even many years later I did not believe anyone would do such a thing on a bike until I got back into cycling again. I rode with them for an hour until I decided the girl would not leave the guy for a dweeby teen like me (aka I was getting bored and wanted to go my own way).

The end of the bike came when I was riding one day and things just felt too soft and I just knew that squirting oil at different places on the bike was not going to fix this. When I next road the bike, it still felt soft and then I realized the frame had snapped at the driveside chainstay/seatstay junction. Then I got a MTB....
 

AndyRM

XOXO
Location
North Shields
I had a, much hated, Raleigh Twenty. To be fair, it wasn’t a terrible bike but I had saved my pocket money for a year and worked weekends in my Dad’s bike shop for a Puch Pacemaker. He presented me with the Raleigh. Not happy.

The actual worst bike was a freebie, with a gym membership. Apollo XC-26 Mountain BSO. Just bloody horrible.

I forgot about my Apollo XC-26. It was all I could afford at the time and served its purpose I suppose, but I was riding home from university one day and the bars/headset just stopped functioning and nearly put me under a bus. I walked it home and couldn't for the life of me work out how to fix it.
 
Bickerton folder. Like herding a collection of spare parts down the road. You had to consciously keep the image of the shape it was supposed to be firmly in mind at all times. If you didn’t it would try and morph into something else such as a push chair, a pedal powered cultivator or a rowing machine. I have seen much cooler looking Zimmer frames. Nice brochure tho.

Closely followed by the plastic Itera. At the time it came out plastic five spoke wheels were a thing in the bmx world and having some success. A deep web between the spokes kept the rims round. The Itera designers thought that spokes tapering to an elegant point where they met the unreinforced rim would be just fine. Fine for producing a remarkable vibro-massage effect. Also the only bike in history with delayed action steering. You applied torque to the system through the handlebars and as time went by, it worked it’s way down to the wheel which eventually turned. Also pigging heavy. ABS plastic might be ‘light’ as a component on a car, but not as the majority constituent of a bike. An object lesson in what happens when you let car engineers design a bicycle: nothing good.

Two bikes of unknown provenance bought by sister & bro in law from a mail order catalogue. When trying to set them up I discovered all the aluminium components were made of raw, un-heat treated metal. Eg brake levers made out of silver cheese. Beaten flat with a hammer they might have been useful as turkey foil.
 
Oh yeah, and the secondhand Viscount Aerospace that the late aged P worked overtime to buy for me in the late seventies; tried to kill me during a TT on the A264.

The dreaded forks?
 
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