I understand you. I'm glad to hear that ur trashing cables and chains and nothing more. My point is for example lets say you encounter a bicycle left lying about like perhaps a light blue Raleigh Supercourse. You notice that this bike would make a perfect "fixie" because it is old and doesn't function. You decide to remove the cables and chain and then all of the parts including the weinmann center pull brakes and Huret gearing system which is not functioning and out of date. Then you convert it into a fixie because it has semi-horizontal dropouts. You may even take the big ring off of the fluted crankset and salvage it into a single ring crankset. Bing bang boom... you took a bike that was "unused" and made it into a fixie thus recycling it. You probably even made good money because it came stock with a brooks on it.
The problem is that all that bike would have needed to be rideable and low maintenance would have been new cables a new chain a little cleaning up and some adjustments. But instead, someone is riding around on a beautiful Reynolds 531 tubed frameset while the ALSO BEAUTIFUL (but "crappy and unused because they're dirty???) Huret componentry which no one knows anything about because its not shimano or campy.
Furthermore, people don't know the difference between good shimano and bad shimano regardless.
To sum up. I have no issue with you, in fact any individual promoting cycling on campus is a friend of mine. However the caveat is, there are differences between "unused" bicycles and unused bicycles. Simply because it was left for the chainset to rust doesn't mean it should be stripped and rebuilt as a fixie.
Did that make sense? I mean... lets face it, I had a conversion. Heck I rattle canned my conversion, but it was a frame with a hole in the steel and it was Sekai's 400 model which was the equivalent of the Wal-Mart edition. I just don't want to see classic bicycles that look like a pile taken off the streets because someone doesn't know what they're doing.
Sheldon would be very upset.