Crown race missing (or is it?)

[sherms]

I found a post of the same fork on here
https://www.retrobike.co.uk/threads/diamond-back-axis-team-1991.454740/looks like the user only made one post and hasn't been back, but you can just barely see the crown race seat in the photo and it (to me at least) doesn't look like theres the extra metal bit. Now this is really tempting me to take a flathead and hammer it off. What do you guys see?

 

[bikeworkshop]

Try a gentle tap.
If it is a separate piece of metal, it will fall off straight away.
If it's the crown race seat distorted by the bearings, it will deform - but it needs recutting anyway if that's the case.

 

[sherms]

I ended up trying to knock it off but it wasn‘t going anywhere. I found a guy localy selling an icetoolz cutting tool for cheap and gave it a whirl. The design of the tool doesn’t really work on forks with shorter steerers, so ended up having my wife press down on the top while I turned the handles. The result is pretty good, a couple leftover marks for the tooling but overall should be more than flat enough to fit a new crown race.

 

[bikeworkshop]

Nice one.
And here's hoping that old headset is in the metal recycling bucket!

 

[sherms]

The old tioga headset was missing the crown race, so whole thing is getting replaced with a shimano m736