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Old 12-22-12 | 12:41 AM
  #147  
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bikingshearer
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From: Democratic Peoples' Republic of Berkeley

Bikes: 1967 Paramount; 1982-ish Ron Cooper; 1978 Eisentraut "A"; two mid-1960s Cinelli Speciale Corsas; and others in various stages of non-rideability.

I'm not aware of any connection between Ron Cooper and the "Clubs" design motif. I've also never seen a Cooper with seat stay caps like those - I've only ever seen the semi-fastback style of joining the stays to the seat lug. That does not conclusively mean Cooper never did either, but I've seen a couple dozen Coopers in person or in photos over the years and have yet to see one with either feature.

As for making track bikes, I personally have not seen a Cooper track bike, but my guess would be that more than one trackie ordered a track iron from him. Just a hunch, but I would also guess that most, and possibly all, of his track frame production stayed in England. It's one thing to make a batch of road frames to export, and quite another to ship off-the-shelf track frames, a niche market if there ever was one, overseas. I could be way off here, but it would seem to me that the economics of it would not makes sense to both the supplier (Ron Cooper) and the importer.
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