Originally Posted by
BigChief
Back in the 30s, the Raleigh Sports started as a lower level club bike. Then a "Sports Light Roadster" was offered with the same frame in roadster trim. Then for some reason, the club version was dropped, but the Sports name continued on the roadster. Confusing since it wasn't a sports bike. As far as I know, except for that one model, all the Raleigh made club bikes used a totally different frames from the roadsters and were made from 531 tubing. The older ones used 26x 1 1/4" rims. I'm looking forward to seeing this bike too.
The only summary I know of covering a wide range of Raleigh and sibling clubmans is the set of articles written by Peter Kohler and availabe on his website. I think there were a few that did not have Reynolds tubing, though more than a few of them did.
Can't argue with you re the Sports/Clubman connection. Year to year, Raleigh seemed to play "shuffle the cards" with the bike names. At least, I couldn't keep track of them. I was actually only interested in my bike, so ultimately I only focussed on it and its lineage. 531 was pretty common, but fully DB tubesets were not.
Different frames? I can't say you're wrong, but I did not get that impression from my reading of Kohler's stuff.