Obviously I have been pretty much fixated on Paramounts lately. Seems to be a lot of nice early ones around right now...probably the nicest Paramount Mixte I've ever seen just hit E-Bay (Item # 6620971272). However I am trying to pick the collective wisdom of the Paramount aficionados to see if I can make sense of the various sizes of seat stay caps on '60s and '70s models. Good friend and list member Jimmy Katynski sent pics of his '61 and told me you could tell the earlier ones because they had smaller caps on the seat stays. I looked at the pics of a '64 and sure enough they were larger than Jimmy's '61. I consulted another good friend some times List member Raoul Delmire and he figures the smaller ones were on his '61 and '63 but had become larger on his '72-'77 models with the '77 being the largest. This all seems to make good sense...but when I checked my Chrome '72 Paramount, you guessed it, it had the same small stay caps as the very early '60s models. Perhaps the chrome ones, often rumored to be made by a different builder, used the small caps longer? The early ones Raoul measured were 5/16" long...by '77 they had grown to 1 3/8". Might there be some folks out there who could shed a little light on the growth and variation in these seat stay caps? Perhaps there is some consistent trend in them that it would be nice to know about if one has an interest in Paramounts?