USAZorro

PX-10s have 73 or 74 degree head tube angles.

I would leave it be unless there are handling or alignment issues.

dddd

The PX10 had relatively slack angles up through the 1972 model that featured new "plain" lugs.

Then, the 1973 model returned with Nervex Pro lugs, but with MUCH steeper angles in the 75-76-degree range! This I believe persisted through 1974.
I consider these as having Thevenet-era team geometry.

A PX10LE model was sold concurrently with the steep-angled PX10's, but featured different livery and (some) components.

There are other examples of old French bikes having similarly extremely steep frame angles, see below my 1973/4 PX10 and my 1952 E. Christophe, (also my 1974 PX10LE).

Believe me, you can't just reach down and confidently grab your water bottle any old time while riding bikes having geometry like this!

3alarmer 

...they are pretty cushy. Part of the reason I set it up with wheels and tyres in those sizes was to maybe make the handling a little more sedate. The bike came from a guy who had brought it over from original purchase in Germany. It was pretty beat, so all the stuff on it was either from a donor bike or some other source.

rustystrings61 

I think the original bike in the first photo is a PX-10 with a PR-10 fork. I think the fork is from the 1973-74 period when Peugeot was experimenting with the really steep angles.

CliffordK

Looks bent to me

It would seem like the choice is if the bike is actually at home, then pull the fork, lay it on a flat surface. Prop up the steer tube so it is parallel, and see what it looks like.

Road Fan

To the OP: I won't argue about leaving it alone if there's no strong indication of bending, but it's worthwhile to make sure your frame tubes, including the fork, are not kinked, ie they actually do not have any clear indication of bending. Looking at a photo not taken for that purpose might not be a good substitute for a qualified inspection with eyes, fingers, straight edges, maybe a reference table with precision tools, and the benefit of experience. Ultimately all of us out here looking at your frame pictures are just a bunch of looky-loos on the internet. Some of us MIGHT be better writers than others. I had some doubt that my UO-8 fork was bent until I pulled it out to overhaul the bearings, and there was a kink in the steer tube above the steer tube stiffener. With an experienced bike mechanic we managed to straighten out the kink and reinforce it a little. I've been looking over my shoulder whenever I've ridden it, but there were no other kinks, so MAYBE it's not so bad. OTOH, I have another UO8 frame, though not so pretty.

Numbers: My PX is a 1967 or 1968, due to the extra claw on the NDS dropout and the block-letter "PEUGEOT" on the DT, but with zero bordering or backgrounding. Official size is ??, but the ST is 515 mm c-c, TT is 550 mm c-c, head tube is 107 mm, chainstay is 42 cm. In some previous year I measured the head and seat tube angles and I got something near 73 and 73. This time I used my iPhone app "Clinometer" which is very sensitive and precise but I'm not sure of the accuracy. However, "zero" agreed with my other electronic level FWIW. This time I got seat tube angle 73.5 degrees, and head tube also about 73.5.

I made a lot of measurements but I didn't follow the protocol of recording all of the cases and averaging them, which smooths over the outliers. The biggest difficulty is that my service stand is not rigid and it will vibrate if disturbed with a weight up in the air, and as I stand there holding the iPhone in place waiting for the reading to stabilize, it responds to the smallest motions of my body. Another difficulty is that with the short head tube it is not easy to get the phone pressed on a flat portion of the head tube.

To measure frames better, I'll have to think up some more tweaks - maybe some kind of plate fitted to the headbadge or the headset bearing cups, and maybe a wooden strut from the frame to the floor to stabilize the vibrations. Or just cough up the bread for real machinist tools.

Road Fan

But a different fork does not alter the head tube angle, unless it raises or lowers the head tube relative to previously. And the effects of those small changes are very difficult to see in a photograph. Different forks could have a large effect on fork offset, and hence trail.

Insidious C. 

dddd's px10 posted above (first pic) is another example with fork crown like OP's. Again, similar vintage.

francophile 

We can quickly tell the bike is a repaint/re-decal, so I'm calling foul on that being the original fork for that bike. Notice how far down the tube the seat tube and INOX decals are, both are about 2-4" lower than they should be, main seat tube decal is almost into the derailleur clamp, compare to others above it. Fork decal is in pristine shape compared to DT decal, which is suspicious, I'd suspect someone added after the fact. It's a nice try, maybe the frame is PX-10, but the fork, not so much.

I'm really with Chas on this one, emphasis is mine.

miamijim

I see what your seeing in regards to decal placement. But, 1974 'Inoxydable' decals are very low on the seat tube. Prior to re-location of the '531' decal to the DT it was on the ST sometimes below both 'Inoxydable' and 'Nervex' decals. IMHO ddd's fork is correct. So far we've seen that fork 2x in this thread and there's another PX10 on eBay with the same fork. While not common, it is an original PX fork.

LesterOfPuppets

Fork in the pic looks to bent back just a very tiny little bit. Fork blade won't be split by the pink line in a photo with this perspective, but the rear taper contour looks to be near parallel to the pink line, which one wouldn't expect, but just drawing lines on photos isn't very exact.
It's off by so little (possibly not at all) I wouldn't even worry about it myself.

dddd

I can't make out the exact fork crown in the catalog photo, but this is a good picture of the steep-angled 1974 PX10E.
The fork description says only Simplex ends, perhaps the earlier catalogs specified Nervex crown???

https://www.bikeboompeugeot.com/Broc...0Page%2017.jpg

3alarmer 

...I always figured the reason they did some of those with that fork was to put the bigger 27" wheels on them. But I don't know why I figured that .

francophile 

I hear you, I just don't know if frequency of appearances is a good metric. We're all vintage bike nuts here on BF and most want the best of the best and that's a good reason we'd see pictures of PX10s in such rapid succession, of which some have non-PX forks. It's also a great reason why someone - probably not the current owner - would slap a Reynolds sticker on a lesser fork, your bike just doubled or tripled in resale value with a $10 sticker on each side.

And as for why we would see this so much, other than slapping a sticker on a lesser fork giving a boost, I believe availability is a factor. Realistically, I'd be shocked to learn the Reynolds-forked bikes made up any more than 15-20% of Peugeot's global bike sales. If accurate, we have an 80-85% pool of non-Reynolds forks out there, ripe for the picking in case someone needed a replacement for an damaged original unable to be saved.

I have two non-Reynolds replacement forks in my shop right now for just that reason. Accidents happen, I think we'd all be shocked to learn how many accidents the bikes we keep have been in, even without showing immediate signs. Trying to source a cheaper model replacement is a fraction of the cost of trying to find a proper Reynolds replacement, especially considering the Reynolds-forked bikes were sold less frequently than the lower-end ones.

The fact nobody can find a catalog picture showing any of the PX/PY bikes the lesser-quality 3-point crown in catalogs is telling. Then, having a couple of different people here on BF who sold Peugeot at the time of manuf'er or knew someone who did who're able to confirm PX/PY bikes only had Nervex/Dubois/Wagner-esque machined crowns ... it's compelling enough to me to call PR10 on anything with the rudimentary 3-point crown.

As you know from your website, there's a loooot of catalogs out there. Your site is offline still (I think?), but we still have the resources of Bike Boom Peugeot and PeugeotShow to tap into. On a whim, I spent half an hour digging through those from 1966-1977 just for S&G to see if I could find any example. Nada. That's not to say "mistakes don't happen" at the factory or at the shop selling. No doubt the may've been an odball case of product shortage at the factory leading to a few dozen bikes getting something different on the crown.

Or maybe forks got damaged in transit and less-morally-stout shops may've swapped a PR-10 or lesser fork onto a PX10 frame to salvage some revenue. But generally speaking, based on catalogs and anecdotal data from others in the scene at the time, I think the evidence tips more towards PX-10 never being made without a Nervex/Dubois/Wagner-esque crown, of which the 3-point crowns aren't. And from a logical perspective, why in the world would a bike manufacturer put a crown from their lowest-end models on their flagship bike?!! Talk about risking reputation!

Entirely my 2¢ of course. I personally wouldn't buy a bike labeled as a PX-10 if it had the cheaper, heaver, and less-attractive 3-point crown which was sold on all of the lower-end bikes. (But absolutely no offense intended to anyone who may have!)

rustystrings61 

I'm with #francophile on this one. I still contend the fork is a replacement, in all likelihood a PR-10 fork with added decals and this happened at some point or another along a 45-year or so journey. I base that in part on what I observed in the late 90s when I was gathering data for David Goerndt's old PX-10 database, coupled with obsessively studying PX-10s for many years.

Regarding the theory that this is a parts substitution at the factory - Nope. I contend that Peugeot was the 800 lb gorilla of French cycle manufacturing. When Stronglight couldn't make enough mod. 93 cranksets, it was Gitane that had to go to Sugino, not Peugeot. It was Gitane that had to substitute other fork ends on the Tour de France, not Peugeot on the PX-10. When Peugeot wanted something from the French bike industry, they got it, and I would suspect that is also true of fork crowns.

The ONLY deviation from normal catalog spec I can see with Peugeot is 1972, when suddenly they built the PX-10 with the plain Nervex DuBois lugs and not the curly Professionals - and as a side note, there's a story waiting to be extracted about what happened with the supply of those lugs, and I bet it was more than just a supply of (clunkier and harder to braze!) Carlton Capella lugs that led Raleigh to switch away from Nervex Pros in '73 on Super Courses, Internationals and Competitions. Someone with access to the right people and documents could probably winkle out what happened with Nervex at the peak of the bike boom, but that's a tale for another day.

Even the cobbiest 1973-74 PX-10s I've handled, when they were cramming uncut tube ends into the BB shells without bothering to trim them, even those had some sort of nice crown. I truly believe that fork has been switched in as a replacement.

desconhecido 

If it's a PR10 fork, it should be pretty obvious on inspection. I have a PR10 and the seam on the fork blades is pretty pronounced/obvious.

francophile 

But not always conclusive, it doesn't take much to conceal that seam for someone wanting to be sneaky, although the chromed area is significantly more difficult nowadays with environmental restrictions, or without painting the whole fork, removing the chrome sock.

That said, you bring up a good point that could really help people, so I went to the shop to take a pic of a early-mid 70s PR10 fork I keep down there so I could highlight two tells which - if they exist - are a dead giveaway it's a letter-quality fork for this particular case.

And that is the seam at the back of the fork you mention, which was used on all of the cheaper forks well into the 80s, and the little divot - and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here - from where the crown was pinned to the blade for brazing, similar to what you'll see on the BB shell of some bikes as well.

EDIT¹: It's entirely possible the machined crowns were also pinned. I can't speak to every model, the only three machine-crowned French bikes I have right now are my Gitane SC, Gitane TdF, and my PX, and none of them show exterior signs of having the crown pinned without a pair of readers on, at least.

EDIT²: More info on pinning, if you're interested: https://www.classiclightweights.co.uk...-builders.html

bertinjim 

francophile -

I thought those were spot welds. I have seen similar recessed dots on shifter braze-ons and other Peugeot frame parts. By the way, the stamped Peugeot crowns were often used with 531 blades on Euro market PS 10s which we didn't get in North America. In the early to mid-70s bike boom, it would not be a real surprise to see such a fork on a PX 10 if that would keep it moving down the production line. The only definitive way would be for wrk101 to buy it and look at the back of the fork.