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jc Higgens colorflow

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M

mountain

Guest
Can anyone identify the year of my old JC Higgens Colorflow? I have the info off the bottom of the crank. I am not 100% sure that is what it is but a couple guys on this site made a suggestion that it may be. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks again to the guys who got me this far.


This is what the bottom of the crank reads:
MUSU
MOD 502 4540
2264

Jason Welch
Tioga, PA
 
If I'm interpreting the Sears # system correctly, 4540 is the catalog model#. The Elgin/JC Higgins/Hawthorne book shows a 1948 Spring/Summer cat. page, and the Deluxe men's model was 4534, and the springer version was 4518. The next page is 1949 S/S, and the numbers are 4552/4554. So yours might be fall '48. Pics would help though. It appears they called it 'color stream styling' thru 49, then went with color flow.
 
color flow/stream

So this is interesting about this bike. Pretty impressive you have access to the 1948 Sears bike information. Is there a link to the old Sear catologs so I could see what this bike looked like in it beginning. I can post some picks if you like. On another post someone had said that the skip tooth crank was an older style that what the bike came with. Thanks.
 

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Mountain, the info I have is from the "Collectable Elgin-J.C.Higgins-Hawthorn Bicycles" book by James Hurd & T.A. Gordon. It features catalog pages from Sears and Montgomery Ward's, but not both spring/summer and fall/winter pages for every year. Your bike could be a bit newer, I'm not sure what year they started using that curved lower bar frame. They did have skip tooth JCH's thru 1955 though. Also, your bike has a sprocket from a 1930s Westfield, sometimes called the 'coffin sprocket'. There were Westfield built Sears Elgin bikes thru the early 40s that used that one. Yours should be the Murray sprocket, it has three rows of oval cutouts. Girls' bikes had two rows, as they were smaller.
 
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