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[oliver1850]

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[97CSI]

Most likely a cast crown so are cast or stamped in rather than engraved. Don't understand the rest of your question.

[David Kirk]

This will sound silly and I suppose it is - Serotta engraved the crowns themselves and used them on a few models. So some bikes had engraved crowns and some didn't. But sometimes we'd run out of non-engraved crowns so the engraving would be filled in with brass to make it a standard crown.

It was our way of wasting both money and time.

Dave

[shiftyfixedgear]

It was simply a case of using up fork crowns on hand and filling in the engraving. It is relatively easy to drop some brass on there and then use a Dyna-File to make it all smoove and unnoticeable after you paint it. Doesn't take that long, either.

Framebuilders have a tendency to buy more castings and then have extras on hand. Remember that when that frame was made there was also a shift starting to happen with people choosing aluminum forks from Sakae and Vitus, along with the early Kestrel (and other) carbonium forks. Those crowns engraved Colorado were probably looking like dead stock and so they got used up on the less expensive (but still very nice) Nova's.

I've also seen builders fill in the cast/engraved logos from the casting shops or designers, just to have a "cleaner" look.

[oliver1850]

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[David Kirk]

thanks Dave, I suppose the rational was that if some customer got a Nova with an engraved crown, then his buddy ordered one and it didn't have it, the 2nd guy might have been upset. It does seem silly, but I can see that keeping the product consistent was the goal.

yeah - I think it was also a value added deal. The high end models got engraved crowns and the rest didn't and to use the fancy crown on the base model undermined the top model.

That and we ran out of crowns.

dave