John, To my recollection, some aero crowns have blade spigots that can match up with home-brew-squished regular blades. For example, the first and second crowns below, iirc, are those types. The third crown below, the $49.50 paperweight, may not be possible to mate with regular blades though, as methinks, I say, methinks, the sockets/blades are larger than the regular stuff. Also, the aero blades that come with this crown are quite nicely creased at the backside, moreso than others I've seen. I've made one fork with this crown, presently painted purple, more than 20 years ago, and to my recollection, the blades started out bigger than regular-sized. (Same as the red Fuji beow.) So could you buy the third crown John, and get to metal mating it? I suppose I'm willing to bet all of a dollar -- my recollection was two decades ago! -- against your being able to squish regular blades onto it.
http://www.velobase.com/
http://www.flickr.com/
Joe Starck
Madison, Wisconsin USA
http://www.youtube.com/
> From: John Thompson <johndthompson@gmail.com>
\r?\n> Subject: Re: [CR] Need some help identifying a fork crown
\r?\n> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
\r?\n> Date: Monday, February 7, 2011, 7:45 AM
\r?\n> On 02/06/2011 12:23 AM, MNF wrote:
\r?\n> > Dear Tom,
\r?\n> >
\r?\n> > Thats an old Tange Aero fork crown. Serotta also used
\r?\n> some of them but
\r?\n> > turned them around backwards and IMHO they looked even
\r?\n> more interesting.
\r?\n> >
\r?\n> > See : *http://tinyurl.com/4p7p74w*
\r?\n> >
\r?\n> > They took an odd sized fork blade, so even if you
\r?\n> wanted to use one of those
\r?\n> > crowns you would have to also track down the odd-sized
\r?\n> matching fork blades.
\r?\n> > I'm sure there are some out there somewhere . . . good
\r?\n> luck finding some. I
\r?\n> > saw some recent Kaisei blades that might be close
\r?\n> enough, but I'm not
\r?\n> > positive.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> They were actually standard blades that had been re-formed
\r?\n> to the "aero"
\r?\n> shape. I'm sure at the Tange factory they had a fancy press
\r?\n> to shape
\r?\n> them, but with some judicious squeezing using a bench vice
\r?\n> and wood
\r?\n> blocks you could turn regular blades into the same thing.
\r?\n>
\r?\n>
\r?\n> --
\r?\n>
\r?\n> -John Thompson (john@os2.dhs.org)
\r?\n> Appleton WI USA