Joe Bender-Zanoni wrote:
>
> "The leather of the B.17 is cut from a better part of the cow's hide than
> the B.15. Brooks describes the B.17's leather as "select butt"."
>
> That's the party line, but if you really know how to look for variation, the
> Venn diagram of quality has a large overlapping region. I would go so far as
> to say that the B15 was used sometimes to stop OEM sales going retail, just
> like "refurbished" often means brand new stuff we need to dump and not have
> our supply chain holler.
>
> I have seen both saddles with doublers indicating a thin hide, not nearly as
> many B17s but some. I have seen B15s with excellent thick and even hides and
> B17s that were running totally from thick to thin (the worst).
>
> Some suppliers like Schwinn might have had so much clout and quality control
> as to demand better B-15s (the OEM theory). You would know- do the
> distributor catalogs show the B-15 as available seperately?
Party line??? Sounds like paranoia Joe. You mean Brooks has been lying to the consumer all these years?
The existence of a "doubler" (I'd call it a "reinforcement" glued to the underside) doesn't necessarily indicated that the leather is thin. I have a B.17 from 1955 that has the thickest leather I have ever seen on a Brooks and it also has a reinforcement glued underneath the saddle.
And yes, the B.15 (no hyphen by the way) has always been in the catalogs and available separately. I know nothing about OEM sales and have never seen anything in the trade publications about OEM sales either. Where do you get your OEM info Joe?
Chuck Schmidt SoPas, SoCal
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