Fork is out. Steerer tube looks as if it has never seen the light of day in 83 (?) years. Because it hasn't.
The crown has a pair of cast X-shaped plugs in it that both stiffen it and locate the steerer tube and fork blades. A far cry from the slightly downsized version of this crown used later in the 1960's.
Yep, she bent.
Notice how the front brake stirrup guides aren't straight and kinked to the left. Remember this, it'll be important in a minute.
I noticed both blades had a sort of French bend going on, with the back of the blade more or less parallel with the crown, rather than the center or the front. After eyeballing the fork crown, I decided to pull both of them forward. The end result looks better and I'd expect it of a Raleigh product.
And she's straight. Or at least, it looks that way:
Not really. Also note that it's kinked to the left.
I spent a fair amount of time checking and re-checking the blades from top to bottom to verify if either of them had been raked more or less than the other. They checked out. I also took a straightedge to the sides, which turned up nothing to suggest that either blade had lost length from getting curved or bent left or right.
The Park dropout alignment tools also verified the dropouts were parallel, but given the slotted design of these fork ends, it's not really possible to assume that one is perfectly centered in the hole when aligning them.
After checking and verifying the blades over and over, I finally decided to invoke
close scrutiny of the dropout ends. Given how many factors affect where the dropouts wind up, I
never assume that a fork is built with one blade a tad longer than the other until eliminating all possibilities.
...
but this
is a Raleigh.
Heavy-duty craftsmanship? Yes.
Excellent enamel finishes? Yes.
Precision framebuilding? Hell, no.
It's only about 1.5mm difference, but the small difference at the hub adds up to a huge difference at the rim edge. That explains why the brake stirrup receivers - which showed no evidence of ever having been repositioned or unfastened until I pulled them tonight - were angled to the left. They have probably been like that since this bike was new.
Put simply, the factory goofed and got the left fork blade lower than the right. It's minor, so someone in QC probably didn't catch it and file the thing before it went to paint.
I'm going to rectify this with some careful filing of the left dropout tomorrow. It took eighty three years to get this fixed.
-Kurt
P.S.: I
never file dropouts unless I can prove without doubt that that the fork was built wrong and no other option exists.