Carlton "Ten"... coming together slowly

Midlife":c9wx5lu3 said:
iirc the Longfellow wasn't a separate bike as such just the nickname which stuck for the 25" (as spokesmann says it was nearer 25 1/2") version of a model which still eludes me....

Carlton in the earlier days had alliterative names (phonetic) for quite a few of the models.....Corsair, Continental, Cobra, Kermesse, criterium...

I'll have a think :D

Shaun
Click to expand...

They liked their alliteration! Clubman, Constellation, Connaught, Catalina...

The Continental could also come in a 25-1/2 frame too!
 
Hi, thanks for the help. :cool:

Deff no chrome under the paint. As for a repaint, the paint is thin and over a grey undercoat.

Serial No at top of post. Does have a hanger at the seat bolt. Frustratingly, the CP brakes have no date code :?

Looking at it now, the imichrome might be the originals, but stuck on in the wrong place!

Would really love to know what this is.....
 
Spokesmann

The "Clubman" you mentioned ignited a few memories :)

Carlton always provided frames for people to build on what they wanted, even during the takeover by Raleigh........even low end frames costing £20 odd in the 70's

The Clubman morphed into a 531 frame by the time I went to Uni (197:cool: but there were a other frames in the range which someone might have bought and built into "their" bike.. Gran Sport / Grand Prix / Grand Lux rings a bell ..

Maybe someone bought a frame and added their own bits ?

Shaun
 
Piperdave":8denry53 said:
No sign of a 531 sticker, and it feels a bit heavy to be honest. What might Carlton ahve used as tubing?
Click to expand...

The usual cold rolled electric seamed raleigh gas pipe.
 
Piperdave":1f5byio5 said:
No sign of a 531 sticker, and it feels a bit heavy to be honest. What might Carlton ahve used as tubing?
Click to expand...


Truwel hi-tensile steel or similar. I dont like the fact some arrogant fools refer to it as gas-pipe... its not.
 
Mike, I know you would not use welded cycle tube for gas, but it is commonly called gas pipe. It is soft ductile tubing produced to braze easily, and if you look at the seat pillar sizes you can see why it is heavy.
This carlton is mass produced when carlton were forced by raleigh to produce something like 20 times the number of frames that they managed previously.
This doesn't make it a bad bike, but these schoolboy/teenager bikes were made down to a price because that's the market they had. Also the frame design was seriously limited by legal requirements in the clearance between the pedal and front mudguard.
I happen to have experienced the size of the retail market for genuine lightweight bikes in the 1960's, and it was a very small percentage of bike production. When I was a one man retailer I had the biggest retail accounts in the whole South of England with the two main importers of the day.
Carlton were stuck in a decreasing market, like the other British manufacturers. They managed to sel BSA/Sun to the US after 1971 for a time.
So Truwel tubing of the time was about the cheapest that would do the job.
 
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