Blackbike
Senior Retro Guru
Hi Frankenorange, I hope your having a great day
Industrial tubing is always marked with what applicable specifications are met along with lot/batch number, country of manufacture, and who made the stuff, usually ink marked.
I am a creature of the military-industrial complex so commercial products I am not that familiar with but I can say at a minimum a commercial tubing product will have the manufactures name and a lot/batch traceability code inked on it for in house quality control.
This marking most likely vanishes during manufacturing and paint prep.
Early Reynolds steel production was roll marked with the most prominent marking on the steer tube.
So based on the Olympic sponsors contract with Reynolds name on it the works bikes were absolutely built with Reynolds tubing, the production bikes were most likely built on the same fixturing and jigs as the works bikes due to the hydroformed airfoil sections and generally speaking the tubing was already in the bag for the production bikes.
So I'm saying the entire run of works bikes and the first and only run of production airfoil bikes had to be planned as a continuous production operation to absorb the development costs and tooling for 70+ works bikes + spare frames and used reynolds tubing throughout the production of everything because that deal was in place from the beginning as it single sources the material guarantees delivery and saves you money.
My frame is S/N 503 with a build date of 06/97 so late production. My guess is the total production is less than 800 production frames of both configurations. So that works out to 10 production frames for every works bike built for competition.
No money was made on production bikes because the the stench of Olympic failure was overwhelming...
: Mike
Such is life.
