37fleetwood
Riding a '37 Fleetwood
a friend and I discussed your bike at length last night and we discussed everything you mention. I agree it isn't exactly a Model 31 but it doesn't fit Model 21 either. so that leaves us back where I was kinda leading. Huffman would sell you whatever you wanted on whatever frame you wanted. there is no curved down tube frame with drop stand tabs in the catalog. again speculative, imagine Model 31 later in the year, Huffman decides not to build a new run of straight downtube frames but has some of the drop stand rear end stuff, and putting a curved tube in is an upgrade so they do it without a second thought. in 1940, there are no 26" frames at all with straight downtubes. when they ran out of the straight tubes they switched to the curved ones for everything, they wouldn't have bothered to make more on a bike that was gone in a few months anyway.
I don't know what you want to hear, Huffman was a small manufacturer, many of the bikes you find fit the catalogs well, some do not. yours is one of the ones that do not. there are several possibilities, we know from the sheets I posted above that Huffman would build any bike with any parts the dealer wanted. your bike fits somewhere into that reality. your frame and fork are from a lower level bike, your fenders rack seat paint scheme and handle bars are from an upper level bike, yet all of it looks like it came together. unlike Schwinn, this really doesn't matter much as far as it's value goes. you can look at it two ways, either it will be impossible to really know what accessories it would have had, or you have carte blanche reign on putting anything from that year on it. there is no way anyone will be able to say that's wrong, or it shouldn't have that light, etc...
I don't know what you want to hear, Huffman was a small manufacturer, many of the bikes you find fit the catalogs well, some do not. yours is one of the ones that do not. there are several possibilities, we know from the sheets I posted above that Huffman would build any bike with any parts the dealer wanted. your bike fits somewhere into that reality. your frame and fork are from a lower level bike, your fenders rack seat paint scheme and handle bars are from an upper level bike, yet all of it looks like it came together. unlike Schwinn, this really doesn't matter much as far as it's value goes. you can look at it two ways, either it will be impossible to really know what accessories it would have had, or you have carte blanche reign on putting anything from that year on it. there is no way anyone will be able to say that's wrong, or it shouldn't have that light, etc...
