They still are, if you ask Jim Barnard.

He was 9 years old when he discovered his Raleigh Chopper under the Christmas tree in 1970. He shoveled a circle in the snow outside so he could ride the metallic-blue contraption in an endless loop. After the thaw, he sampled freedom in a world within pedaling distance.

"Three freakin' gears. It was all available," he says.

Thirty-five years on, Barnard has more than a dozen Choppers lined up in a garage in Bloomfield, not far from where he climbed astride his first. In the past decade, his quest to reclaim that long-lost bike blossomed into a curatorial calling as he acquired enough Stingrays, Screamers, Draggers and other rare bicycle varieties from the '60s and '70s to create what he's dubbed the New England Muscle Bike Museum.

Though he'd rather ride them, Barnard shows off his bikes by appointment when fellow collectors and nostalgic pilgrims of a certain age ask for a tour. More than 100 chrome-and-candy-colored specimens line the walls and dangle from the ceiling. Here and there, spotlights and laminated description cards illuminate these former playthings, elevating them to artifacts.

But the vintage Farah Fawcett poster, lime-green couches and record player arranged around a furry rug make the space as much a clubhouse as a shrine to the simple pleasures of youth.

"This harkens back to those days when you didn't have a mortgage, you didn't have kids. It wasn't adult life. Back then life was a wheelie," says Barnard.

That could be a mid-life statement from anyone trying to reunite with their younger selves, whether through flashy cars or skydiving. But Barnard seems like he's always been on speaking terms with the kid who, when he inevitably fell out of love with his Chopper, unloaded it on another kid for $25.

Quick with a dry joke at his own expense, Barnard wears his hair in a curly mop that spills over his forehead. He walks around in Converse high-tops of two different colors. Occasionally he schleps to Boston or elsewhere to play a gig with his instrumental surf-rock combo, The Clams, in which he plays bass and sometimes takes home enough money to cover gas.

For a living, Barnard runs a Bloomfield business that his father started, Northeast Lightning Protection. As he describes it, rigging homes to weather rogue lightning strikes is a niche, the commercial equivalent of collecting muscle bikes.

"It's not like opening up the book of stamps that go back in the drawer when you're done," he says of his hobby. "It's not a muscle car that you blow 80 grand on, and you're financially tapped and [ticked] off at it. We make this almost sane. I've been able to make the hobby pay for itself."

After tracking down a Chopper like his beloved, Barnard began hunting other styles, buying them one or two at a time. He scoured the yellow pages for old bicycle shops when he found himself in unfamiliar towns. Eventually he began buying out entire shops in Massachusetts and New Jersey, selling off the surplus and keeping the valuable muscle bike parts and models.

Like his lemon-yellow Swing Bike. A stunt bike once advertised on "Donny and Marie," it's endowed with a hinge under its banana seat that lets a rider pivot the frame and, theoretically, ride with a tire on the curb and one on the street.

"It has pitched me on the ground more often than not," he observes.

Or the green Dragger by Iverson, which he bought for $1,876, the most he's ever paid for a bike. Designed by George Barris, better known as the maker of the Batmobile, it's an outlandish pedal-powered beast with a 3-foot "sissy bar" extending above the white seat. It's in eerily pristine condition.

"Sometimes I pretend that the kid who owned it got hit by a truck right after he got it, and his parents put it in his room, thus preserving it for posterity," Barnard says.

As his collection swelled, Barnard sucked in a fellow scout and accomplice in Wanda Stone of Ellington, a family friend. Though she didn't have a bike of her own until she was 14, seeing Barnard's collection touched off something for her.

"It was almost like I had found the missing link," she says, adding, "I bought a toolbox."

As often as not, Stone brokers the deals with buyers from as far as England and Japan through the museum's website (nemusclebikes.com) or on eBay. But neither Barnard nor Stone enjoys that aspect of the hobby.

"I don't buy to sell, and I don't sell well," says Stone, who has accumulated about 20 muscle bikes of her own, including a Chopper repainted in a shade she calls "Barbie pink."