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Arnold schwinn excelsior truss bar dating

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The plot thickens

Well popped the crank out to clean it.says as 16.cleaning the frame some found excelsior on the down tube real faint but there well no painting this one now
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Congrats again on a wonderful ride and beautiful cleaning job!

1916!!! Great to get a date associated with the bike!

Here is the 1917 celebration of the 1,000,000th Schwinn. It has the same built in dropstand-stop, fenders, fork... but with the big X logo/badge instead of the Excelsior Supply/Cycle versions.

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...in 1916, Ignaz and Frank living large with their X lightweight and new 17 series X!
What a classic picture! I like the caption. "A chip off the old block."
I've always wanted to find one of those lightweights.
You would think that it was a popular bike, but I've never seen a modern day picture of one in a collection.
 
This bike is kind of a missing link, for me at least.

The 1917 ad says Schwinn made their millionth bike (presumably by sometime in early 1917).
The crank on this bike says 1916 and the serial number is 862653.
Since Schwinn made 1,000,000 bikes between 1902 and 1917 (as the ad states),
then they were producing on average about 65,500 bikes a year.
I speculate that the output was lower in the early 1900's and picked up in the teens.
In fact, the 1917 Schwinn “Excelsior” catalog says that the 1916 output was well over 100,000 by the 1st of November. I further speculate that a lot of their frames were sold to/thru
Wards, Mead, Black Beauty and hardware stores like Hibbard.

Somewhere in 1917 there was a Schwinn-made frame with the serial number 999999
and the next one after that was 000001. I would like to see some frames in the lower number ranges, both early 1900's and late teens.

Starting over at 000001 in 1917 helps explain why by 1930 Schwinn bikes have serial numbers at 450000 and by 1934 serial numbers at 500000.
After 1917, it appears Schwinn was producing on average around 30,000 frames a year.
Lower output due presumably to WWI, the downturn in the early 20's that apparently killed Davis and Black Beauty.

(Another theory would be that Schwinn made another million frames between 1917 and, say, 1925 and restarted at zero again moving towards 450000 by 1930, which would mean they would have had to produce around 100,000 frames a year between 1917 and 1930. That seems much less probable to me. Maybe someone has more evidence?)

Also of note: The badge uses rivets rather than screws. The seats stays are not pinched. In the 1917 Schwinn “Excelsior” catalog some of the frames appear to have pinched stays and some do not. At some point, most, if not all, Schwinn frames have pinched stays.
 
Excelsior truss bar

Well got it together today.put a seat and light I'd been saving for years put a wheel set on it.saved 30% of the paint .is a carbide lamp still used in 1916? I'm doing another wheel set for it with the correct hubs
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