Wow. 1st post!! I'm soooo nervous.

I'm the proud owner of an early 1990s Miyata Triplecross. Totally happy with it. It rolls like a champion.

Quick question...I can't find a serial number on it. It's not under the crank or on the headstay. I need it both to register the bike in the event it is stolen as well as to determine the year of manufacture.

Anybody know the story?

It may be stamped around the BB shell, non-drive side I think. Sometimes difficult to see because of the paint.

It may also be on the lower part of the seat tube, non-drive side. It will be in two parts, one above the other. Again, these were difficult to see because of the paint.

Well done! Bottom of the seat tube and reeeaally hard to read. In fact, only a couple of numbers and letters are partly discernible but it is definitely there. I'll have to buff the paint down in order to read it. Cheers.

Based on the location of the serial number, this will probably be a Dod Sun of Taiwan serial number.

The first line of the serial number will 4 characters, widly spaced. The first two characters will be "D" and "S" for Dod Sun. The next character will be a number for the year of manufacture of the frame, probably "9", "0", or "1". The last character will be a number "0" or "1", the tens column of the number for the month that the frame was made.

The ones column for the month is the first character of the second line. The rest of the characters are numbers.

Hope this helps you to read the serial number. Let me know what you come up with, if you don't mind.

D S 9 0

1 8 ? ? 4

Thanx for this. The numbers above are barely discernible. I'm at work at the moment (horribly busy as you might guess ;-) and have yet to buff the paint down a bit. Other than registering it against theft, this might be enough as I was curious about the origin (Japan or Tiawan) and the year of manufacture.

It's been a great bike. I bought it in about 2005. It had the original dried out tires with the nublies (those little spikey bits left over from manufacturing.sticking out and not a hint of the brakes being applied on either rim. I paid $150 Canadian for it and then put $150 of fenders, lights, racks on it. Kevlar tires has saved lots of swearing at the side of the road. I road it occasionally until last September when I started riding it daily as a 10kms round trip commuter. Weekend rides are now turning into overnighters. A cheap trailer lets me do grocery runs.

The only thing that bugs me is how springy the front fork is..as is the frame in general. It's comfy because of it but the flex sometimes has me concerned that a YouTube bicycle fail video might be in order if I hit a big something in the road.

Thanks for the info. I'll figure out the last few numbers when I buff it out and post here again.

I wonder if putting some paper over it and doing some shading might work?

I lifted it onto a filing cabinet (cuz my knees ain't what they used to be) and used my cell phone light at a sharp angle. Shazam!! Just like 007 stuff.

D S 0 0

1 0 8 9 4 5

These bikes are great sleepers. My 1991 sportcross does not have any noticeable flex but is straight cromo. I have ridden it hard on both gravel/trails and commuting which is how it currently rolls. These cross bikes were all Taiwanese built so not as pedigreed as the earlier Japanese, but they were built well even if a budget line.

Those serial numbers take a bit of work to figure out. Unfortunatly, if it is stolen and recovered by whoever, they probably will not take the time to find/figure out the serial number.

Dodsun has been around since at least the 1970s. They were one of the manufacturers of Swing bikes, an almost fad from the 1970s. More recently, there are Dodsun brand name bicycles. I don't think that you need to worry that the quality is poor, it isn't.