bulgie 

Hey ​​​​GP210 can you tell me, is Benotto engraved (or cast, "engraved look") in the top of the crown, right and left over the blades? This isn't to help date it, sorry I can't help there, but you've already gotten good advice on that. I'm just curious because when I was at Davidson, we got a number of those crowns from Takahashi, which I believe means they were cast in Japan, probably by Hitachi. I'd be very surprised if those were cast in the '70s, I think early '80s more likely, but that's only based on the frame parts I saw back then. And I know for sure I wasn't seeing everything that existed (duh!) There's a slight chance that the crowns we got were an exact copy, but I don't think so, I think they were the very ones Benotto used.

The Takahashi crowns that I think were Benotto came to us in about '84-'85. They had the tops lathe-turned, presumably to remove whatever logo was there, possibly engraved or pantagraphed, but I think more likely cast-in. It is rare to the point of non-existence to see machining done there on a cast crown, so they had to be "erasing" something. The story I heard was they were Benotto crowns that Takahashi was stuck with when Benotto decided not to take the number of crowns they had committed to. Don't take that as gospel; I don't remember whether that was relayed as fact, or maybe Davidson was just guessing, or something like that.

The only reason I have for thinking the logo was cast-in rather than pantographed is that casting is cheaper when you're making more than a few. More investment in the molds, but when you save the cost of pantographing on each unit you make, at some point casting the logo is cheaper. Our Davidson seatstay top-eyes were cast by Takahashi (or whatever foundry they subcontracted to, sometimes Hitachi) and the lettering of the Davidson name was very crisp. Lots of people told me they assumed they were pantographed. The fidelity or resolution of edges and fine details in their castings was amazing.

Those Benotto crowns were aesthetically pleasing, to my eye. Since we got them at a very good price and had enough of them to sell to other builders, I tried to get Peter Weigle interested. He was putting heart-shaped cutouts in lots of places on his frames back then, so I carved hearts in the sides of one of those crowns and sent it to him, but he didn't bite, I guess he didn't like them as much as I did.

They are the older style of cast crown where the tangs for the blades are separate parts, stamped out of sheetmetal. There were pockets cast into the blade sockets to take the tangs. In the '90s and after, the fashion switched to crowns with the tangs cast integrally. Nothing wrong with the separate tangs really except the builder has to pay a tiny bit more attention to making sure the tangs ware fully wetted with filler (e.g. brass or silver), both to the crown and to the blade. Integral tangs have one less surface you need to get the filler to flow out on. One small advantage of separate tangs is it gave the builder one more place to show individuality, such as with cutouts. The "four aces" cutouts were popular but at some point became sort of a cliché. Integral tangs had to be thicker too, because casting really thin edges is difficult and ends up being expensive due to a higher number of rejects, where the molten steel doesn't flow out everywhere in the mold. I think pretty much everyone agreed the tangs were only decorative, not helping appreciably with strength or stiffness, and thin edges are generally desirable on high-end frames & forks. The thinness of the edges was one of the standards high-end frames were judged by, and hand-thinning with files is slow and expensive, so starting out with thin edges that don't need thinning was considered a plus. I think later, thicker lug edges began to be seen as more acceptable, even on fancy frames. So most IC lugs were not thinned, they were just left looking the way they looked right out of the box. This saved the framebuilder a lot of time/money but some individuality was lost and frames started to all look the same. Some FBs started doing other goofy sh¡t to differentiate their product, like MS or Gilco shaped tubes, aero features, straight unraked blades etc. The last dying gasps of the steel racing frame before the nonferrous competition started eating their lunch.

OK that's quite enough rambling on about a very trivial detail, hope I didn't put anyone to sleep.

Mark B