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I used to think I knew, now I'm not so sure!

The fully-sloping one with the inside plugs, I used to confidently state was a Davis. Then someone here (BF) pointed out there was more than one UK firm making "Cinelli-like" internal fully-sloping crowns. Look for example at the Raleigh Pro, and then the Raleigh Competition. Similar, but different! I guess our working theory is the Pro used a Davis, whereas the thinner, more machined one on the Competition and Super Tourer is a Harrington. I can't find any source or corroboration for that though, so consider it a tantalizing hint not a fact. I had noticed the difference between the Pro crown and the Competition, but I guess I just assumed it was just a case of running changes, or maybe Davis made a couple slightly different models... I can't even tell which one you have in your box, though I could tell if I had them in my hand. Probably Davis though, if I had to guess. The crowns I have in my box of obsolete crowns are from Davis — I think! Someone please correct me if that's wrong:

I've made a few forks with them, late '70s to early '80s, and I don't look forward to doing it again. Too much work to make 'em look decent.

Moving on to those two crudely forged externally socketed ones. They're clearly the same crown with different feature cuts. Kevin Sayles [a framebuilder for something like 50 years, worked at Bob Jackson, Woodrup and others, now building under his own name], said he thought they were Milremo '14bis', but since Milremo was just an importer/distributor, that doesn't tell us who made them. Kevin thought Prugnat. But Norris Lockley, an even more knowledgeable FB (started in the '50s) said no, he was friends with the Prugnat family and had visited their factory many times, and they never made fork crowns. Their stuff was all pressed and welded sheetmetal lugs. In 1985 Prugnat was bought out by Wagner (who did make forged crowns) when old mad Prugnat retired. But Norris was quite sure that the "Milremo" crown was not made by Wagner either. I concur, from my much more limited knowledgebase: Wagner made a lot of different crowns, but they all have a certain family resemblance, and those Milremo crowns look unrelated, too different. They actually remind me more of certain Italian crowns I've seen.

Your Milremo (I guess I'll ditch the scare-quotes and just call them that, for lack of a better name), the one with the nicer feature cut, was used on probably just one year of the Motobecane Team Champion (a.k.a. Champion Team). The extreme roughness means a lot of work to make them look nice, but I think they look pretty stylin' on the Moto

Both Kevin and Norris said they were so poorly made that they had to throw a lot of them away, searching through the box to find a crown that was good enough to actually use.

It would make me really happy to have someone here chime in with actual knowledge on any of these crowns. It bugs me to not know!

Mark B