rhm

I mentioned this in two other threads this week, but I guess it's time to put it out there a little more publicly.

A month ago this frame was offered for sale on the CR list:

and I bought it. It didn't arrive until this week.

James Fothergill ran a shop in Liverpool starting in 1938 according to this page on the Classic Lightweights website. According to the seller the frame dates to the 1940's. He identified the tubing as 531, presumably because it takes a 27.0 seat post.

The black paint had been sanded down on the front of the head tube, front of the seat tube and sides of the down tube, either to remove decals or in hopes of revealing hidden ones. This revealed traces of green paint and traces of Fothergill's name on the head tube.

Here are a few more photos of the frame as it came to me:


I had hoped I might keep the black paint, at least for now; but it was just too awful. I continued the sanding, and turned up some interesting details:



I will probably strip off the remaining paint this weekend. The only damage I've noticed is a dent on the head tube that will need to be filled.

I think I will return it to the original color, but am not sure what the pattern was. There was a panel on the seat tube bordered by 1/2" stripes, but I haven't figured it out what color they were; all sanded off before the black paint went on. A patch of tubing has been sanded completely bare near the top of the seat tube, presumably where a decal of some kind was; I can't find any trace of it.

Though the seller dated the frame to the 40's, I am thinking it might just as well pre-date the war; but what do I know.

Comments, suggestions, advice, &c are all welcome. In particular, if anyone recognizes the lug pattern, I'd like to know what it is. There was a 1938 Claud Butler on ebay several months ago that had the same lug pattern, but I didn't save the photos.

lotek 

You need this web page:
https://www.classiclightweights.co.uk...ill-james.html

Marty

edit. Didn't see the link in OP's post. but you might check with some of the members over
there to see if they have any further info on the marque.

-holiday76

I don't have much to add except that I love it. Here's a Fothergill headbadge.

rhm

Yeah, I saw that head badge, and I like it; but it seems so 1950's to me. I just can't believe it on my bike.

JunkYardBike

Nice! I'll join you with it on its first (flat) century.

rhm

Cool! But where are we going to find a flat century?

-holiday76

parking lot circles?

I've ridden around the Delaware bay a few times. Wilmington - Lewes, De - ferry to cape May, back up to whatever is on the Jersey side of the Delaware Memorial bridge. It's flat, but it takes two days.

Princeton to Cape May and back must be flat.

Anyway, I don't want to get off topic or anything...

JunkYardBike

Long Island? Pine Barrens?

-holiday76

Anything in Delaware/South Jersey.

rhm

Both good ideas! In fact, I think I'll try them both next year.

Oldpeddaller

Nice frame RHM. The steerer stamping seems to say "A&P", which would indicate Accles & Pollock tubing, probably 'Kronos', rather than the more common 531 from Reynolds. Reynolds later bought Accles & Pollock but at the time they were completely different products.

JunkYardBike

Keep me posted. I'm interested! (sorry for the thread hijack)

rhm

Thanks! I know enough about A&P to know that's what the stamp means, but I have heard that A&P steerer tubes are found on otherwise all 531 frames. You know, I read that on the internet, so it must be true.

But what do you mean by "at the time," though? Do you agree with me that this looks pre-war? If Fothergill started in '38, there's not much time for that.

Oh, I forgot to give you the serial number:

Isn't that helpful? 12121, I think.

bobbycorno

Flurrida?

SP
Bend, OR

nlerner

Great project, RHM! So what's the build list?

Neal

Veloria

Oh my! I can't wait to see how this turns out!

supercycle62

Me too!

rhm

Once it's painted, I'm going to build it up with mostly English parts from the early 50's, since that's what I have on hand since I collected some nice stuff for a Holdsworth project that fell through. The most visible parts will be a Williams c1200 crank, a chromed steel stem, Bluemels Tour-de-France fenders (shiny aluminum), old Brooks B15 saddle, and a Resilion derailleur shifting two cogs attached to a Sturmey Archer internally geared hub. The hub is a '53 AW with alloy shell laced to 27" rims.

But the more I look at my frame, the more I think all that stuff will be anachronistic. This frame is from the 40's at the latest; 30's seems more likely to me.

Yeah, me too! At the moment I'm trying to decide how to paint it... that is, both who/where/when and what kind of paint; but also what color(s)? It used to be green, with no decoration beyond the two stripes on the seat tube, the understated gold lettering on the head tube, and (I think) a 531 transfer on the seat tube. It's very tempting to just recreate that. But there's also evidence that this wasn't the original paint; and beyond that I actually have no confirmation that it's really a Fothergill at all.

dbakl

Love the lugs and how the seat stays attach, but way before my time, I know nothing!

rhm

BF member mavesyn has posted a 1955 Fothergill on his blog at https://merseysidebicycles.blogspot.com/ and is helping me research my frame. So far, it appears that my frame has a different serial number format and placement than any confirmed Fothergill.

mavesyn

I have put a link from my blog, to this thread.

And in the new year i will be visiting a chap, who used to do some of the paintwork for Fothergill's, and he should be able to confirm wether it is a Fothergill or not.
Even if it is'nt a Fothergill, it's still a very nice frameset.

rhm

New developments, and I'm excited!

As I said before, I sanded off a lot of paint. Under the thick black paint I found this light green, slightly metallic, that seemed in pretty good shape. I was beginning to be pretty sorry I'd used sandpaper, especially when I found that I have a can of some nasty solvent (xylol or something?) that dissolved the black without hurting the green. But it was too late to save. I carefully sanded off the black so I could document the green as well as possible, then stripped off everything.

The bare steel turns out to have a lot of black stains, which I take to be the result of rust that was cleaned away long ago. The green was evidently a repaint done after the whole frame had been stripped and cleaned very well; only these black stains remained of the rust. My chemical paint stripper had left little islands of green paint where the gold stick on letters had spelled out "fothergill" on the headbadge, and I wanted to take a photo of that, which I did:
Then, while staring at that, I realized there was a silvery area that wasn't stained, right in the middle of the head tube. Where a head badge should be. And I remembered...and that's it! I have to take back my comments about that badge. My frame clearly had exactly that badge stuck to its head tube.

Only later did I realize that the black stains on the seat tube also form a clear pattern, preserving a rectangle exactly the size of a 531 decal, and the same Fothergill badge, both fairly high up:

I was pretty happy about that, and spent a lot of time looking at the area below them, assuming something was preserved there as well. I didn't find it.

I did, however, find a very strange pattern on the down tube, starting at the top pump peg. I immediately assumed it was lettering, but I couldn't figure it out for the longest time. Both sides had the same pattern, which had a little point at the lower (bb) end, and a larger blunt end at the upper (headset) end. If it were writing, I figured, one of them was backwards. And upside down. So that didn't compute. Here's one photo of the lower end of this pattern:


Now, here's where my professional training steps in. While writing my dissertation I made thousands of drawings of ancient works of art, mostly preserved in very fragmentary form, using all the preserved bits to come up with a reconstruction of the whole thing-- looking for patterns, making sense out of what's there in order to imagine what's not there. So I got out pencil and paper and painstakingly drew the outline I saw. Then stared at the outline long enough for my mind to fill in the lines that weren't there. And it worked! Without warning, the whole thing made sense to me, and I drew in the remaining lines, to come up with this. It's sideways!


The strange shapes of the serifs actually match the font on the headbadge, and it has the same underlying pattern of tapered stripes. I'm unclear about what's at the top-- possibly a J, but I think there's something else going on there.

Anyway, the bottom line is, this frame originally had Fothergill transfers on it, over terrible paint. That doesn't mean it's a Fothergill frame, of course. I'm sure the decals on the downtube were really designed for the seat tube, and I'm troubled by their use on the downtube. Has anyone ever seen such a thing before?

As for my grief about stripping away the green paint, which probably could have been saved, well, I got over it!

nlerner

Great sleuthing! Those headtube lugs sure are pretty.

Neal

Dave A 

...If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck......

Nice work!!

Dave

rhm

Thanks, that's more or less what I was thinking, too. Knowing the bike originally had Fothergill decals frees me to put the same ones back on it.



Hey, what do you people think I should do about the paint? I can do a rattlecan job (when the weather warms up) but I know that wouldn't be a really durable coating. But if I have a professional do it, they'll do a modern looking paint job, far superior to the original but with the wrong look. Not to mention expensive, especially if I go for contrasting head tube, decals, &c.