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I think bikes are also not very good since they need maintenance and parts, and it will be very hard to find those and they won't be produced anymore.
Nah, bike parts last a long time and are relatively simple to fix or even make (as long as you're not talking about some dentist's $10k carbon road bike). My main (non-electric) bike is from the early '90s and is still on most of its original parts, except for stuff like tires, brake pads, and the chain.
Also, bikes have existed for 200 years, which means they predate things like, say, the assembly line. I'm pretty confident that even in a post-apocalyptic scenario you could scrape together enough of a supply line and basic tools to build them from salvaged raw materials.
I love this conversation of the Post Apocalyptic Bike Foundry, but gotta say that bike frames will be absolutely ABUNDANT and it would make no sense to manufacture them When most every basement and garage and department store has bikes in them; plenty to scavenge.
The part I'm curious about is tires. Rubber gets old and dry and cracks. What do you make tires out of of without rubber? Maybe leather bound to the wheel? And replace frequently?
Edit: Looks like you can recycle rubber, but not sure what equipment you need, but I'm sure it's going to smell awful.
Lathe + drill + foundry to cast a big enough chunk for the lathe and drill. Rivets for putting together the frame. (And some power source to run your shop)
Maybe an endmill or even CNC machine, if you're feeling fancy, or welding for the frame (someone else might know what exact kind of welding you need).
Nobody rivets together a bike frame. Frames are brazed, welded, or (in the case of carbon fiber, bamboo, or occasionally aluminum) glued. The only places I've ever seen rivets on a bike are on the chain, old-school leather saddles, and maybe to attach layers of stamped steel on really cheap brake calipers.
Or even just a set of hand files.
More carefully-constructed bikes typically use TIG, and for aluminum you want an AC welder. But who's going to be making a titanium, aluminum, or even fancy steel (with Tange or Columbus double-butted tubes) bike in the apocalypse? Any welding process would work for steel, especially when you're building out of random scrap plumbing pipe or whatever.
Your most realistic options would be stick, MIG, or even just brazing with a propane torch. Or building your bike frame from bamboo lashed together with rope and glued with pine resin.
The reason I brought up riveting is because you can do it with basic hand tools (and an open fire for hot riveting). If some kind of welding would work, yeah, do it the normal way. You aren't going to have propane, though, and insulating gasses might require some ingenuity.
If you can hand file a bearing that runs reasonably smooth, I'm impressed as hell. Definitely somebody can - the first lathe got made somehow - but it's definitely not me.
Wood might be an option, and bamboo seems like it would be a decent option. Once you're talking wooden sprockets and chains, I'm guessing your going to end up with a pedal wagon more than a bike, though, because it's going to be pretty heavy.
Nobody rivets a bike frame because it's made out of hollow tubes and rivets are designed to pinch flat things together. Rivets are just the wrong tool for the job.
Of the metal-melting joining methods, I guess brazing is probably the most low-tech. Maybe propane would be a problem and you'd have to use some other fuel instead (maybe wood gas?), but it's been a thing since 3000 BC so I'm sure an enterprising person could figure some solution out.
Alternatively, the flux coating on a stick welding rod is apparently made mostly of cellulose, which is less exotic than I expected.
Behold, a lathe:
This stuff isn't as high-tech as you think.
But never mind that; depending on what scenario we're talking about it seems likely some machine tools would survive (e.g. in rural areas, maybe), so the trick would be to find one and get it running.
I am not. I'm talking about, say, salvaging sheet metal from abandoned cars and stamping chain links out of that. Nobody wants a wooden chain; if you're that hard-up, you'd probably be better off trying to go for a belt drive or shaft drive. Or hell, even a penny-farthing!
Good point. Like, it seems like another kind of beam would work, but you never see that. Maybe it's about aerodynamics?
I'm definitely aware of the pole lathe, but you can't really do metal machining on it. For that, you'd need at least a Gingery lathe. Or, I'd assume so, since Gingery wasn't an idiot.
The first pole lathe would have had a freehand-made bearing - Gingery mentions the same thing about the first screw, as well. I made a post about the problem of bootstrapping bearings once, and there probably is an alternate way if you're mostly booksmart, but in any less complex society you have a fair amount of master handcrafters who can do crazy things.
But yeah, there's little machine shops in my rural area, at least. Toolmaking would probably be the bottleneck over the long term. And just things being designed to lock down if tampered with by anyone but the OEM - farm equipment is notorious for that.