When conversing with forum member knoregs following the entry of his 1982 Superior into the
Paramount Registry yesterday, something interesting came up:
My own '82 Superior is serial
#20609, headbadge date code
1232 (Blt. 123rd day of 1982).
Kelly's '82 Superior is serial
#20620 - presumably 11 frames following mine - with a headbadge date code of
1372, that is, the 137th day of 1982.
There is a 14 day difference between the headbadge codes, with 11 bikes produced in that time period. Assuming a 5 business day schedule, and also assuming that this production rate remained constant throughout the entire 3 year run of Superiors, that would work out to be an average production rate of one Superior a day, or 330-350+/- a year (adjusted for holidays), for a total production of roughly 1,000 frames, give or take a few.
Plausible? Ridiculous? Interested to hear your thoughts. At any rate, that would be an extremely small production run. On the other hand, considering the fact that these things were built from leftover Paramount parts, 800+/- "left over" Nervex lugs
* kicking around the Paramount cage isn't chicken feed either.
That said, as no thread is worthwhile without pictures:
My #20609/1232:
Kelly's #20620/1372:
-Kurt
*Some '83s supposedly did not use Nervex lugs. However, the only place I've seen this reference is in the '83 catalog, which also fails to mention that the Superior was available in blue metallic and black. That said, every '83 I've seen so far has Nervex lugs. If such a Superior
was produced, I compensated by putting a guess that the batch of Nervex lugs ran out somewhere. I removed 200 lug sets out of the 1000.
Again, it's entirely a guess.
Another thought to ponder: Since all Paramounts had been using Prugnat BB shells with Nervex lugs, Superiors followed a similar pattern, though with a generic Japanese BB shell. Were a few '81s produced with leftover Prugnat shells? Who knows?
Heck, the catalog bike for '81 (and repeated for '82) isn't even a Superior - it is a doctored up 1978/9 P-13.