Originally Posted by
jamesdak
Good link James...
As
T-Mar pointed out in his post, in the early 70's there were several bicycle books that tried to explain tubing including the cryptic Reynolds decals:
531 Straight Gauge 3 Main Tubes
531 Straight Gauge 3 Main Tubes plus 531 Forks and Rear Stays
531 Butted 3 Main Tubes
531 Butted 3 Main Tubes plus 531 Forks and Rear Stays and so on...
Then there were the French versions...
Marketoids plus naive and not so naive bike shops took advantage of inexperienced buyers during the US Bike Boom Fad. Reynolds 531 became the iconic standard for identifying a "top quality" bike regardless of what the decals indicated.
Back then there were a lot of European bikes made with some sort of Reynolds 531 main tubes but gas pipe forks and stays! The 531 main tubes may may have saved a few ounces but the bikes still rode like entry level gas pipe models.
About 1976 I received a 3 page mimeographed copy of Reynolds 531 "Stock List" from them that showed all of the bicycle tubing dimensions that they produced. It included straight gauge main tubes with thicknesses down to 0.3mm!
They could provide just about any combination of tubes they offered as long as they included enough tubing to build at least 100 frames. Lesser quantities had to be purchased through a "Stockist" which in the UK was their primary vendor Holdsworth.
This chart is from the 1974 edition of
DeLong's Guide To Bicycles & Bicycling. It shows the commonly available Reynolds 531 tubing sets from that era (along with Columbus Tubing).
Reynolds 531 Sprint tubing with 1.02mm x 0.71mm main tubes was the standard wall thickness used on most production frames up into the early 80's.. Schwinn Paramounts were made with that tubing - straight from the horses mouth - Richard Schwinn.
A number of people in the US made fake Reynolds decals like these from a 1974-75 bike magazine ad. Reynolds' lawyers came down on all of them like a ton of bricks. They fiercely defended their trademarks.
verktyg
