[CR]check your steel Campagnolo headsets please

(Example: Framebuilders:Pino Morroni)

Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 07:11:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Tom Dalton" <tom_s_dalton@yahoo.com>
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
Subject: [CR]check your steel Campagnolo headsets please

David, This is going to be some challenging detective work. There are a couple of things to consider: 1) One or more of your headsets may be newer or older than the frame in which it’s mounted (though if it is significantly newer it is probably not ‘original,’ whatever that means) 2) Campy may have switched back-and-forth on some of the minute details, such as the periods, through time. One reason for this, as was pointed out to me by the esteemed Mr. Maasland, is that dies wear out, get switched around, etc.

I never noticed the no-periods, one-period, two-period differences before. I will keep an eye out to try, over time, to make a “story” out of this, but it may never happen. You mentioned a “no-<C> no-periods lower cup as what you expect would be the last version. Is this just speculation, or have you seen one? If you haven’t I there any good reason to think that the periods were removed at some late date. All my newer headsets have periods after each BREV.

Here is what I think the story is: Overall the early headsets had the <C> and the later ones did not. There are also some differences in the crown races early on. I don’t think that Campy would add the <C> and drop it again, but you never know. I think it is much more likely that the sequence was:

BREV CAMPAGNOLO ITALY BREV CAMPAGNOLO <C> (your ’72 Bevilacqua)

BREV CAMPAGNOLO ITALY BREV. CAMPAGNOLO <C> (Kurt’s the ‘70 Bartali)

BREV. CAMPAGNOLO ITALY BREV. CAMPAGNOLO <C> (I have a loose one like this)

BREV. CAMPAGNOLO ITALY BREV. CAMPAGNOLO ITALY (your ’65 Frejus)

Of course, this is completely at odds with the dates of the bikes, but one would only need to call on two conditions to resolve this.

1) The headset in the Frejus is not original, or the bike was originally assembled well after the vintage of the frameset.

2) The unit on the Bevilacqua was a couple years old when it was installed.

The majority of the part-to-part differences that I see in NR and SR stuff are in the stamped-in logos and other markings. It is difficult to impossible to really nail down the sequences of variations to this level of detail, try as I do. It is even harder to put absolute dates on the changes. For my purposes, I figure early 70’s NR headsets have the <C> later ones do not.

Tom Dalton Looking too hard in Bethlehem, PA

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