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Wards Hawthorne project

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BLK80SLT

Look Ma, No Hands!
This belongs to my 90 year old uncle who reluctantly agreed to allow me to refurbish it for him. He thinks he bought it in 1941 maybe, and stuck it in the rafters in his garage around 1956 possibly. I brought it down yesterday for the first time since then. It's completely original and I think it will clean up pretty good. I'd like to find out when it was actually made. Any help would be very appreciated. Here's a few pics.
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Very nice! Yeah, looks to be a 1941 Snyder(Rollfast) built Wards Hawthorne. The fork is bent back pretty bad, but that can be remedied with a lil work by skilled hands.
I didn't notice the fork until you mentioned it. It's hard to really tell it's bent in person. I'm going to make some initial cleanup of the front end today and see what it looks like. It so full of saw dust and years of dust from the garage that it's hard to see all the details. As a whole, the bike doesn't look too bad. I know the paint on the headlight is shot, but I don't think there will be much painting to do.

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I took off the front end with no problems at all. He must have it something pretty hard because the fins on the left side of the fork crown are slightly compressed. I may leave that all alone. He's never going to ride it. It's going to just be for show basically.
I opened the tank. Wiring is bad with rust in there. I did find the instructions for the Make A Lite generator tucked inside there.
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