Hi, my name is Matt and I'm new to the list. I live and work in Hawaii as a graphic designer.
I own 3 bikes: an old lugged Raleigh road bike, a lugged road bike turned singlespeed that originally had a sticker on the headtube that said 'Motiv' (yet looks like no other motiv I've ever seen) and a Diamondback cyclocross bike (which I am nowhere near as fond of as the first two bikes). The Raleigh was the bike that first got me interested in old road bikes. Everything here seems to be carbon this, titanium that. Partly what attracted me to vintage road frames were their sense of character. Most new bikes seem pretty generic to me. Little attention to design details and more emphasis on what the frame is made of!
Anyway, I'm wondering if any of you have information on when my Raleigh was made, and what it was called?
The frame is chrome, stamped with "raleigh" in the dropouts both front and rear. The shifter cables route under the BB, through a plastic router. The components are a mix of Suntour, and the cranks say "raleigh" on them, but I'm not sure if the components orignally came with the bike.
The serial no. is
3 K N 0 7 9 7
and above it is stamped something that looks like the reserved symbol, the R with the circle around it. There's something else stamped on the BB but I can't see what it is with the plastic router thingie in the way.
The lugs are fairly conservative.
I did some research on the web and the closest model I could find to my bike was the Raleigh Team RacingUSA. The only difference is that it had Campy dropouts, but for the most part looked almost identical.
I honestly don't know if this would be considered a 'vintage' bike. But if there's anyone who knows, I reckon they're probably on this list.
Any information would be appreciated.
Mahalo,
Matt Yee
Honolulu, HI