Sturmey-Archer hubs famously have a YY-MM date code stamped into the hubshell.
Fun fact: SunRace Sturmey- Archer hubs (since 2001) have a dot-matrix laser-etched alpha-numeric date code on their hubshells.
They adopted:
First position, letter indicating year. 'A' was 2001. 2026 will be 'Z'.
Second position, letter indicating month. 'A' is January, 'L' is December.
Third and fourth positions, letter and number indication day of the month. 'A0' is the first day of the month, 'A9' is the ninth day of the month. Then it gets tricky! 'B0' is the tenth day of the month, 'B9' is the 19th day of the month, 'C0' is the 20th day of the month, 'C9' is the 29th day of the month, 'D0' is the 30th day of the month and 'D1' is the 31st.
So, let's see:One AW hub just says 'Patent', indicating it was manufactured before WWII when Sturmey was selling off K hub inventories (or during the war, and Sturmey was hiding some civilian production from the war department - stories differ!).
My AM is 51-3, March 1951.
One SW says 58-10, October 1958.
One SW (NIB!) reads 58-11, November 1958,
My GH6 Dynohub reads 78-12, December 1978.
The S5-1 hub was manufactured in 79-6, June 1979.
Another AW hub reads 88-7, July 1988.
The SRF3 indicates FCC7, March 27th, 2007.
My XRK8 reads IEB4, May 4th, 2009 (early adopter!).
My RSRF3 reads JFB7, June 17th, 2010.
The RXRF5 reads OKC4, November 24, 2015.
My XRF4 says RDB0, February 10, 2018.
Last edited by tcs; 02-11-23 at 12:56 PM.