Check out my new 1979 TA!!  Just picked up a 1979 Columbia Bicycles Trans Am 12 spd bike.  I believe it to be all original.  I posted a couple pics of it all with the brochure I found for it on the web...

Very cool. I'd like to know more about it.

The info I got from a guy that used to work at Columbia Bicycles is these were sold in stores and were at the higher end of their massed produced bikes.  He thought they sold for $79 in 1979 the only year they were made. Obviously not many sold because you never see them.  I thought it was homemade when I first saw it, but after researching I found they were indeed real.  Don't know the thinking behind the creation of the bike though.  He also said the Shimano shifters it had were pretty high tech for the times.  Kind of silly to buy just because I have a Bandit TA but what the hell.  

Nope, not silly at all. There are a lot of product and marketing tie-ins, some are just a lot more successful than others.

Get a bike rack and take it to car shows with the car.  Get bored at the car shows and go for a ride.  Nice combo.

18 hours ago, mberns1 said:

The info I got from a guy that used to work at Columbia Bicycles is these were sold in stores and were at the higher end of their massed produced bikes.  He thought they sold for $79 in 1979 the only year they were made. Obviously not many sold because you never see them.  I thought it was homemade when I first saw it, but after researching I found they were indeed real.  Don't know the thinking behind the creation of the bike though.  He also said the Shimano shifters it had were pretty high tech for the times.  Kind of silly to buy just because I have a Bandit TA but what the hell.  

I did a little internet research on this. Mind you there is not a lot out there on the Trans Am. It seems the Positron shifter was not a big success for Shimano as they had hoped. Since the Positron was produced for relatively low end (price point) bikes back in the day, the Positron index shifting system had to be made as inexpensively as possible, which in turn sacrificed reliability - especially by today's standards. This further gave the stigma that index shifting was for "beginners only" and thus delayed acceptance of better index shifting systems by more experienced cyclists for several years.

Edited January 19, 20179 yr by Frosty