Well, The usual reasons for skipping a letter are things like
C can be confused with G or O especially if it's poorly stamped F poorly stamped can look like E I is often skipped even when not stamping, it looks too much like a 1 J isn't usually skipped, but could be confused with a 1 if stamped poorly O is almost always skipped since it looks like 0 (I wish my computer would do the 0 with the slash through it) P and R are easy to mix up Q is usually not used for the same reason as O
And It dosen't matter here, but sometimes T,U,V, and Y are skipped as well, mostly because of the stamping thing. Another reason to skip these is handwriting, I'll let you see some of mine if you have any doubts here.
Steve Birmingham Lowell,Ma
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 20:51:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Fred Rafael Rednor <fred_rednor@yahoo.com> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: Re: [CR]Raleigh Pro fast back Message-ID: <20040427035133.75252.qmail@web11901.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <003701c42be8$2e651500$22e0fea9@man> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii MIME-Version: 1.0 Precedence: list Message: 18
> Pete, so did I until someone on this list
> scanned and posted the actual memo by
> Raleigh stating clearly the "Second Symbol
> Denotes Month of Manufacture".
Agreed. But why didn't they use the first 12 letters of the
alphabet? It appears as though they skipped certain letters
but there's not real pattern that I can discern.
If they used every other letter, I wouldn't have been
surprised. That might indicate they once used a letter to
indicate the fortnight and later partially abandoned the
system. But that isn't what they did. The document Peter
mentioned indicates the following:
A=Jan, B=Feb, D=Mar, E=Apr, G=May, H=Jun,
K=Jul, L=Aug, M=Sep, N=Oct, P=Nov, S=Dec
Does anyone know why or will this remain one of life's great
mysteries?
Cheers,
Fred Rednor - Arlington, Virginia