Originally Posted by
63rickert
Reynolds still issued Wire Gauge specs for their tubing at least until late 60s. In 40s Britannia still ruled the waves, or thought they did, why would they be metric?
I've no idea how thick the walls of a Super Resilient blade might be The outer diameter is sharply reduced and that is plainly visible. Riding the SR blades there is no question they are plush.
0.91/0.61./0.91 if you want to be pedantic. The point is that the downtube on most older Reynolds tubesets was drawn thicker than the top tube. Reynolds sometimes used metric nomenclature in their later marketing material even if the tubes were actually drawn to SWG, which is why Reynolds marketing material often says 0.3mm or 3/10 mes in French for 753 even when it's actually 0.38mm.
S.R. fork blades are plusher than plain gauge fork blades because they were still butted, but they were thicker than some taper gauge fork blades, which were offered in a variety of tip diameters. Resilient means able to spring back after being bent, not the ability to be bent more (in plain English, stronger) and that's what S.R. blades appear to be designed to do. They took a butted fork blade on the thicker side, then made it even thicker at the moment of bending. As far as I can tell, S.R. blades were designed by Ernest Russ (who also designed the rapid taper chainstay), for the purpose of being being stronger and being able to survive things like head of collisions with a car (Russ' claims, not mine).
I can only assume that the idea that S.R. was extra plush was started because S.R. blades are more expensive, and lighter tubes are more expensive, therefore S.R. blades must be lighter. S.R. blades were indeed higher cost and a premium option, but this is because the pre-tapered blanks were triple butted (1.2/1.4/0.9) instead of single butted like normal fork blades (1.2/0.8 or 1.2/0.9). You could make the argument that they're technically lighter than the 1.4/0.9 heavy duty (track) blades but if S.R. is supposed to be extra plush it only makes sense to compare it to the normal light blade. The New continental blades were drawn out even thinner to 1.02/0.56.
If you have any primary or even secondary source that can authoritatively state that S.R. blades are indeed of lighter gauge or thinner or magically somehow more plush, I'd love to see it, but as far as I can tell they're actually heavier, stronger fork blades than regular 531 taper gauge (albeit with thinner gauge tips than non-531 PG fork blades).