1988/89 part lugged, part fillet-brazed Raleigh frame

[kingoffootball]

This frame was outted on the forum (thanks @Darcus ) and, after a fair bit of effort by my uncle on my behalf, came to my ownership.




It's lugged at the bottom bracket and downtube-headtube joint. The rest is fillet brazed. Any suggestions of who the maker might be?

The rear dropouts are Shimano and the forks have Gipiemme dropouts:




I can't see any evidence of a frame number, but I shall investigate that further.

 

[TreaderSteve]

Cool. Following! Hope you (we) find out

 

[kingoffootball]

A few more details in the hope they spur some identification suggestions. It has a 1" headset, fork a-c is 390mm and the rear spacing is 130mm. I have taken off the cable guide and sanded down the paint to make the frame number visible:



WS8000788 and an additional '4' stamped sideways. Does anyone recognise the format? Could the fairly standrad format suggest it's a mass produced frme that has been modified? Based on the first 8, does 1988 sounds a pretty safe guess? The chainstay u-brake would defiitely point to 1988, my initial reluctance in that was only that is it was a small production frame that might lead to a slightly larger possible timespan.

 

[KermitGKona88]

Worksop (Nottingham), December, 1988... Definately a raleigh serial number...

 

[retrobikeguy]

So could be an Avanti or Ozark, cable stops on headtube match, as does the seatclamp, have you sanded down the top of the seatstays to see if they say Raleigh?

531 frame and Someone put a bit of money into making it fit them.

 

[kingoffootball]

Worksop (Nottingham), December, 1988... Definately a raleigh serial number...

Brilliant, thank you! Quicker identification than I expected. Actually, i always wanted one of these .... although I hadn't envisaged it being exactly like this one.

 

[KermitGKona88]

Yours is certainly a unique one...

 

[kingoffootball]

So could be an Avanti or Ozark, cable stops on headtube match, as does the seatclamp, have you sanded down the top of the seatstays to see if they say Raleigh?

531 frame and Someone put a bit of money into making it fit them.

I'll sand down the seatstays today to check. I wonder where it was taken for the extra work. Do you think someone had it done purely to reduce the standover height rather than to reapir damage? I notice in the helpful catalogue page you've added the smallest size is 49 cm (I'm assuming Raleigh measured C-T) but this only measures 43 cm so the seat tube must have been reduced too.

 

[kingoffootball]

Would they have used the Shimano dropouts on the Avanti and Ozark? The forks are definitely different from those two too.

 

[retrobikeguy]

Yes, cant enlighten us about the fork though