Originally Posted by
Andrea Men
The code stamped on the underside of the saddle is the date of production. Since a few decades you find a 3 digit sequence: "number", "letter", "number". For example 9C2:
-"9" and "2" stand for 1992
-"C" is the month and as it is the 3rd letter of the alphabet it means March
Don't ask me how my English colleagues and forefathers came up with this. I guess it was a way to kind of hide the date of production.
Andrea
BROOKS ENGLAND LTD.
Thank you. I didn't know until now how to decipher that type of code. But what I was describing is different. On the metal plate of my 1966 Brooks saddle is A66. While I understand the 66 means it was made in 1966, the meaning of the "A" is no longer known. From vintage-trek.com,
"The stamp denoted the month and year of manufacture. Mrs. O'Donnell* writes: "Unfortunately, the 'code' book is now lost so we cannot decipher the actual codes used at that time. It is, sadly, not quite as simple as A=January, B=February etc.
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*
The above Brooks information was provided in an e-mail from Mrs. E. O'Donnell in the Sales Department of Sturmey-Archer, when that company owned Brooks. Mrs. O'Donnell was writing to Robert Williams in response to his query about date codes. Our thanks to these two individuals and to Larry Osborn, who secured a copy of the original e-mail."
I ask because this has come up before on the Classic Rendezvous mailing list (and probably here, too). She seems pretty certain the letters do not straightforwardly correspond to months.