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The Fastback definitely has a whole different look. Just a few years back I was at a barn sale, debating whether to buy a pretty ratty Orange Krate for what I recall was $550, something like that, and noticed up in the rafters that the seller also had a Kool Lemon Fastback. He said he'd take $35 for that, but neither he nor I really wanted to have to go up there and get it, so we left it there. I didn't buy the Krate either. God, what an idiot I was.
Not everyone collects bikes
Growing up one of my friends got a Red 64 stingray when they 1st came out. In 1967 he got a Black 5 speed Fastback & I bought his old Red 64 for $10 bucks. 2 other brothers down the road each got Fastbacks as well 1 Campus green & 1 Coppertone. No one around me every owned a Krate.
When I got my first Krate, about five years ago now, my first thought was, "Jeez, this thing is heavy!" I had to make several repairs and upgrade the seat springs before I could ride it for the first time, but once I did, I was impressed (and a little surprised) by how well it worked. With adult-grade springs swapped into the struts, it had a nice floating ride, and the front springer didn't need any adjustment at all: I could look down and see it soaking up small bumps along the way.
It's a little koo-koo to collect bicycles, they take up a lot of room and are difficult to store without scratching them all up or getting them covered with dust. Best to collect small items, thimbles, buttons or something where the entire collection fits in a shoe box under the bed. Nowadays. even housing costs a small fortune for a few hundred square feet, and warehouses are astronomical. I was renting a 2300 sq ft warehouse in SSF and just the rent alone was over $3500. a month, and I had to have mandatory insurance, etc. All that said, I still know about a dozen bicycle collectors, the hobby just gets in the blood I guess. One guy has a two car garage jango'd full wall to wall, floor to ceiling with all the "pokey parts" intertangled together and He can't even get them out to look at them.
One of the neat things about this website is it can gather "population figures" of certain models and put them on a spreadsheet so people can figure out rarity vs. supply/demand. There is one such sheet for the "King Size" Schwinn cantilever cruiser Men's frames, so far there is less than 100 reported. They were only produced from 1961 to 1965 or so. I'd like to see a spread sheet listing the known "krate" bikes someday. How many Orange krates still out there? How many Cotton pickers? etc.
