# D.P. Harris Mfg. Gold Medal bikes



## wozzie (Mar 31, 2013)

Hello everybody

I'm new to this site and I'm a wee bit confused about the brand name of my bike.

It has a plaque that says Gold Medal and under that it says D.P.Harris Mfg.  from what I have been able to research D.P. Harris made several bikes and sold them to different companies?  Is this correct?  I would really like to find out how old my bike is.  

Any and all help is welcome! 

Wozzie


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## Adamtinkerer (Apr 6, 2013)

DP Harris was in fact, a hardware co. that made ball bearings, and owned the "Rollfast" name. They contracted with the HP Snyder co. to build bikes for them, and the distributed them, with possibly the exception of models made for the bigger stores like Montgomery Wards. The Snyder co shut down in the mid 70s, and sold some of their tooling to Emory, who were starting to build klunker style trail bikes. There's no data available for Snyder. But, some clever bike nuts have come together with the theory that Snyder frames were stamped with the year in reverse, plus two letters. So, a 50 frame might be stamped '05 EH'. They appeared to use this coding from 1940 to 1956 or so.


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