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Wartime Schwinn New World Bikes - We Know You Have Them - Tell Us About Them!!

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Here’s mine, I pulled the crank once and that was dated 42, it has an I serial number, and a lot of black out. The sprocket and crank arm aren’t black, but they aren’t chrome either. Wood block pedals and old Carlisle tires but no war stamp. It came out of an antique store in Milwaukee.View attachment 1023924
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Beautiful bike. Looks like a tall frame model. I have the same grips on mine.
 
I've been collecting a few new entries from other cabers. Wanted to discuss a few things. I found some info on when Schwinn started to use rear dropouts on the New World frames. I was looking at the Waterford site and saw this:
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This^^^^^last paragraph captured says the dropouts were started on the New World line in 1938.

The first bike we had on the list was @bikepaulie 's New World with rear forks.
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We had this listed as 1939 but clearly it is pre 1938 if the above info is correct. I've updated this bikes entry to 1937-39?.

@vincev sent me some pics and info on his very original looking men's New World 3 speed. It is a real head scratcher. The bottom bracket has the very old Letter + 4 Number hand stamped serial numbers from 1935-36 but the frame has rear drop outs.
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Just goes to show you that the serial number stamp on the BB may not always be an indication of the exact time the frame or rest of the bike was built. This bike is clearly prewar but what year is not easy to guess. ??

@GTs58 found an old entry from @sbusiello of a rough black New World from 1942.
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The EF BB in the pic above is now the earliest example we've seen so far of this welding technique being used on the BB.

@coryplayford_2009 posted some pics of this step thru with basket.
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Here's the latest chart:
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Last task before bed...set this New World rear fork vs dropouts straight for good.

I began the last post with some "new" information from Schwinn in 1946 that the New World frames had been using dropouts since 1938. That is nonsense and the catalogs from those years show it.

1938 Catalog does not have an image of the New World. Maybe they were introduced after the images were made for the 38 catalog?? The lightweight "Racer" that year had REAR FORKS:
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In 1939 The catalog shows the New World Lightweight Tourist with REAR FORKS:
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In 1940 the catalog shows the New World Tourist with REAR DROPOUTS!
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Here's the New World Racer from 1940 with DROPOUTS too:
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The dividing line for dropouts on the New World frames is 1939/1940. If it has rear forks it is 1939 or older. If it has rear dropouts is it 1940 or younger. That means Bikepaulie's rear forked NW is a 1939 and the youngest Vincev's rear dropout hand stamped bike could be is 1940.

Here's a really sweet 1939 New World Racer Serial B38915 that GTs58 turn me on to. It's got rear forks of course.
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Fixed the chart and added the cool white 1939 NW Racer. Oldest bad boy on the list. :cool:
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@vincev None that make sense. :D

Your New World is not the only one from the 40s that had a weird serial stamping. @Jim Barnard showed pics of this wartime NW with tons of blackout parts and a 3 piece crank that also had an oddly stamped serial number: Jim's wartime NW It used an I serial hand stamp too. Looks like the 8 is upside down and the 4 is out of line:
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Prewar and wartime Schwinn bikes are not consistent and the serial numbering is not always easy to understand. The more we look at it the more we learn and the more we realize we just don't know all the answers.

@vincev Your bike is one of those crazy examples where the parts and style of the bike look like 1940 but the BB hand stamp is nutty, from another era (1935-36). The fact that it's hand stamped means it could have been done outside the regular machine stamping they had started using by 1940. Why they did that and who was using hand stamps at the factory is not clear. But it makes this thread more interesting and worth documenting for the future...
 
I've never put much weight on that snippet about Schwinn pioneering front-facing rear drops in 1938. It was written years later and, given what I've seen and what has turned up in terms of catalogs and actual bikes, I think the claim that Schwinn started front-facing drops in 1938 is merely ad copy oversimplifying something so that Schwinn could make a bigger claim to innovation. My view is much closer to what the totality of this thread shows - that is, that early New World bikes in the 1938-39 period had rear-facing drops. At some point early on, very likely at some point in 1939, the frames moved to forward-facing rear drops such that by the time of the 1940 catalog, the drops were forward facing. I think a rear-facing drop bike could be from 1938 or 1939.
 
@SirMike1983 Thank you for posting. I was hoping you might weigh in too. I know there are a lot of people who have been looking at this much longer than I have. I am often re-discovering ideas and "facts" that have probably been laid out somewhere before. Building the New World chart just reinforces that learning and allows several ideas to be tracked through the years. I feel more confident in when the dropout change happened looking at the catalogs, but I've changed my mind a few times in these past 3 pages.:p
 
Schwinn was known to patent everything, so I would guess there are some drawings that exist with submitted dates. This wouldn't give us the date it was implemented into actual production bikes, yet it may narrow the picture.
 
I've been trying to clear up the falsehood that Schwinn bikes were built on the serial number date for years now. Many seem to think that the frame was built on the date the serial number was recorded but that's also a falsehood. The serial numbers were stamped on the bottom bracket or other components before that component was used in building a frame and it's obvious that @vincev and @Jim Barnard have New Worlds built with older or mis stamped serial numbered BB shells. Those BB shells were probably rejects with those ugly stampings and Schwinn decided to use them up, maybe because they were going to the EF BB shell. As far as Schwinn was concerned, a serial number was just a serial number, and when they found Joe Blow stamper's Ooops, I f'd up another one bucket they used them up. The simple fact that the serials were stamped before the frame was built should clear up lots of questions others have had over the years when trying to date a Schwinn when it doesn't follow the norm. One example is in DJ's pre war serial number list.



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