When I was 11, as the oldest of five, I was awoken early on Christmas morning to assemble bikes for myself and my siblings. This was before kids’ bikes had all of the extra safety devices or even hand brakes. The instructions were actually written by someone who spoke English.
Congrats on getting your kid a bike. It won’t be long now before you are trying to get him a car. And not long after that, you’ll be sitting by the phone wondering when he’ll call you.
Mine just called. :-)
— W^L+ 
Craigslist is great, we use it all the time. Another option is Freecycle, which is a good source/venue for ‘free to haul away’ stuff that would otherwise become landfill, or that is just too much of a pain to try and sell.
> “I’m sure this says something about something, but since I’m late to the party, I’m going to assume that other people have already made the point.”
I think that just became my new motto.
so, why didn’t you just go to a bike store? Performance bike, which is one of the biggest (if not the biggest)chain is based in Chapel Hill. Last time I was in Cary I went to the Performance there and they were great. Then there’s loads of smaller mom + pop ones around too.
— alex
Perhaps next year…a unicycle. It’s great fun.
I share your pain. Bike assembly is a black art left to the practioners who know when to make the appropriate sacrifices.
That said, another source is Toys-R-Us. They’ll sell you the bike, and then (at least last time I was in the market) assemble it for a small extra cost.
Craigslist is the bomb. Someday, when your boy has graduated to higher risk levels and wheel sizes, you’ll go to craigslist, and post something very similar to what you responded to. It’s the circle of life.
— Nick
Admittedly, you probably got a better deal for a bike that’s likely to get pretty well thrashed, but I have to ask the same question that Alex did. Why not a bike store?
When my husband bought a bike from Performance a while back, ordered online & delivered to the store IIRC, you couldn’t get it unassembled even if you wanted to. Same with the little bike store around the corner from my house.
And unlike Target, they can order a bike in just the right size if they don’t have it in stock. (Though that gets back to the “wait $N days” problem.)
— Elaine
Why do computer geeks know so little about websites that regular people actually use?
— Danielle
@Danielle: You owe me a new keyboard. Mine is deluged in tea.
Just random postulation: but I imagine computer geeks sometimes fail to appreciate websites actual people use because of next-big-thing-fatigue. I know it took myself forever to get into the various social networks. Mainly because I had seen it before in various guises, and didn’t see how the “new” was any different than the “old”.
Congrats on the new bike little Pilgrim!
— CuRoi
Mark, Just up the road from the Target on 55 is a small shop called “Cycling Spoken Here” … just trim the spaces and add a dot-com to the end for the website.
We purchased a bicycle for my daughter there precisely because of their kid-friendly attitude, their knowledge of the differences between an adult bike and that of a kid … and because they assembled it at no additional charge.
That said, kudos for getting it done - and not automating the mechanism too much - tough I will hope you’ll post a how-to once you figure out the whole GPS tracking attachment thingie.
And thanks for mentioning the helmet - having crashed hard a coupla times - yeah, we don’t want any of our kids growing up like me; now do we ?-)
@Danielle:
I would suspect it is the noise factor. When I go to sites like Craigslist or Monster.com to look for something, I get buried in “hits” that have little to do with what I am looking for. It becomes too much work (and takes too much time) for me to use this kind of site unless other (more specific) resources have already failed to find what I’m looking for.
For someone who is *much* geekier than myself, I would expect this to be even more of a problem. Maybe someone should create a bot to crawl through the results on these sites and actually find what the searcher wants.
— W^L+