Exercise Bike from the Eighties

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This past weekend I did some traveling to Ohio, to drop my daughter off at college, and then on to Tennessee to see a good friend of mine. My friend has really been getting into scuba diving and since I was asking about diving and the equipment that he has we went downstairs to check out some of his scuba gear that he has in storage.

Exercise Bike from the 1980s

Aquarius 2000 from the 1980s

I learned quite a bit about scuba diving but if you are wondering how all of this relates to this Bike Blog it is because I saw this ancient, exercise bike ~ or probably more accurately Indoor Cycle, in his storage area that he has had since the eighties.This immediately caught my attention since I have reviewed so many modern Exercise Bikes and Indoor Cycles and this bike was obviously from another century.

The bike frame looked a little like the frame on the ironing board that was nearby, it had some rust and the fancy 1980s gauges did not work anymore but this bike had a very heavy flywheel which gave it a smooth resistance and it still worked!

This bike would fall into the Indoor Cycle category these days since it is mechanical and has a friction based resistance (rather than magnetic). The gauges included a color coded meter for RPM with a mechanical odometer at the bottom and a gauge for Watts and some kind of MPH calculation. The wheel cover says Ergometer which I’m not sure if that is a model name, some kind of feature or just one of the ways that they marketed the bike. 1980s Indoor Cycle Ergometer Label

At any rate, it was kind of funny to see (and interesting to me) and amazing that the primary function of this  piece of fitness equipment still worked after all these years. I think that modern Indoor cycles have improved a lot and have come a long way but who knows if today’s bikes will last for 25 years or more as this one did!

Many of today’s higher quality Exercise Bikes and Indoor Cycles have Lifetime Warranties on the Frames and pretty good warranties on the mechanical and electronic parts. See our Exercise Bike Warranties page for a comparison of the warranties on most major brands.

Regardless of the warranties, I think that you will probably feel like you got  your money’s worth from your fitness bike if it lasts 25 years or more like this old Aquarius 2000 has!